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Just to add context to this number, 100 TW of power is 5x all of the power currently used on the planet. About 2 TW of our power comes from solar, and we currently have capacity to build about 1 TW of solar per year. To meet this target, solar panel manufacturing would need to increase 30x today just to supply enough panels for this. This would be enough solar panels to cover every inch of the state of Montana.
Let's completely ignore the hard task of designing the satellites to do any AI calcs, and just look at what it would take to physically get all of those solar panels into space. Solar panels typically weigh 0.2 lbs per watt. This comes out to 20 Tera-lbs, or about 900,000 Eiffel Towers.
Let's assume they figure out Starship, which has a payload of around 100 tons, or about 220,000 lbs. So just to dump the solar panels into space would require about 90 million launches in 3 years. This would mean they need to launch 1 starship every second of every day for 3 years!
Each flight will take around 20 minutes round trip. So to launch every second he would need at least 1200 operational starships. Over the last 3 years, they have made 36. So they will need to scale up production nearly 100x today. Then you need to figure out how to facilitate the launch of 60 ships a minute. Launch pads? Landing pads? Fueling? Maintenance? Failures? Currently the failure rate on Starship is around 50%, aka a coin flip on whether or not it explodes.
And I haven't even gotten to the AI part yet. But as far as removing heat from the AI compute, let's presume they go with low power density configurations, like a few chips per satellite. Even still, we would need Jensen Huang to make 20B H100s per year. Currently they have capacity for a few million, so they need to ramp up production 10,000x.
The H100 chip on planet earth appears to fail at a rate of 10% per year. This means that every year likely 10% of the chips will fail and need to be replenished. Since we have no plan to recapture the satellites, that means they will need to burn up in low earth orbit. Then we are now destroying 10 TW of solar panels every year, or the equivalent of half of the total power infrastructure in the world. They would also be destroying about 6B H100s per year, needing them to be replaced. Finally, we have to get new satellites up to replace the old ones, so we would need to send 1 rocket every 10 seconds FOREVER to just maintain the 100 TW fleet of chips.
Elon Musk is simply LYING. Statements like this are plain old fraud. None of this is even remotely practical or possible in a 3 year timeline, much less a 30 year one.
Read an article this morning on the difference between how Republicans and Democrats fight. He used this as a primary example. What is keeping Democrats from raising this up to the level of viral scandal by linking the Republican party's biggest donor to running a website that is promoting child pornography etc. ? You can be damn sure if George Soros, as an example, ran X and this was happening there would be journalists hounding Democrats day and night asking about why they take money from a pornographer. Schumer and the rest of these useless tools just shrug their shoulders and keep going on the Affordability treadmill.
I suck at linking shit, but it was from Off Message by Brian Beutler on Substack.
