Elon Musk on the economics of space data centers.

In space, it's "always sunny", satellites get constant, high-intensity solar power with no night, clouds, or atmospheric loss, so solar arrays deliver near-continuous energy at virtually zero marginal cost.

Cooling is trivial: waste heat is simply radiated away into the vacuum of space (no fans, water, or energy needed, unlike power-hungry Earth data centers).

Combined with Starship’s cheap mass-to-orbit launches, this avoids building massive terrestrial power plants or fighting grid/land/cooling constraints.

Elon estimates that within 2–3 years, the lowest-cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.

Result: orbital racks of chips can scale to terawatts far more economically than on Earth.

Full video from @SpaceX

"Getting to 1% of the sun’s energy… that civilization is going to be vastly more powerful than us, to say the least.”