Space-based solar could power AI more efficiently than on Earth, with full-scale deployment possible in two to three years, Elon Musk said last week in Davos, Switzerland. SpaceX’s Starship launch vehicle and its reusable rockets aim to sharply reduce space access costs, enabling solar-powered AI satellites and potentially large-scale extraterrestrial energy infrastructure.
Image: Jaredkrahn, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Greenland was not the only frontier market in the spotlight at last week’s World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. Tesla CEO Elon Musk told Larry Fink, interim WEF co-chair and CEO of BlackRock, that solar could power space-based AI, with full-scale deployment possible within two to three years.
“When you have solar in space you get five times more effectiveness, maybe even more than that, than solar on the ground,” said Musk. “It’s always sunny, so you don’t have a day-night cycle or seasonality or weather and you get about 30% more power in space because you don’t have atmospheric attenuation of the power. The net effect is any given solar panel will do five times more energy in space than on the ground.”
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Space also offers excellent thermal conditions, according to Musk.
“It’s a no brainer for building solar-powered AI data centers in space, because as I mentioned it’s also very cold in space. When you’re in the shadow, it’s very cold in space, 3 degrees Kelvin,” he explained. “So you have solar panels facing the sun and then a radiator that’s pointed away from the sun, so it has no sun incidence, so it’s just cooling, it’s a very efficient cooling system. The net effect is that the lowest cost place to put AI will be space and that will be true within two to three years, three at the latest.”
But how do we get all this gear into space? This is where Musk’s other major venture, SpaceX, comes into play. SpaceX is planning a record-setting public offering in 2026 and is on track to further cut what Musk calls the “cost of access to space.”
“Hopefully this year we should prove full reusability for Starship, which would be a profound invention, because the cost of access to space would drop by a factor of 100 when you achieve full reusability,” said Musk. “That gets the cost of access to space below, we think, the cost of freight on aircraft, so under $100 a pound easily.”
Starship, the largest rocket ever built, would be used to deploy solar-powered AI infrastructure in space. Eventually, similar infrastructure could be established on the Moon and planets such as Mars, particularly as smart AI-powered robots become commonplace for building and maintaining these space-based assets. The first step on this roadmap appears to be solar-powered AI satellites.
“One of the things we’ll be doing with SpaceX within a few years is launching solar-powered AI satellites,” said Musk. “Space is really the source of immense power and then you don’t need to take up any room on earth, there’s so much room in space, and you could scale to ultimately, I think, hundreds of terawatts a year.”
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