Elon Musk has given up on solar power (on Earth)

This is Musk’s “first principles” thinking in action. At some point, he assumed the world will need an additional terawatt worth of compute every year, and he worked back from there. “We believe that third-party estimates on data center demand are constrained by the practical supply limitations that exist in a terrestrial context and the power shortage may be far greater than what research estimates suggest,” the company argues.

Possible? Sure, I suppose. But consider that humanity today uses about 35,000 terawatt-hours of energy annually, or about 4 terawatts on a continuous basis. Energy demand has risen lately, and for AI, it probably is in an phase of exponential growth, which could either continue or level off. We have no way of knowing at this point, but if there’s one thing Musk is good at, it’s spotting a trend at its inflection point and extrapolating wildly.

Here’s where Musk’s problems settle back down to Earth. I’m no rocket scientist, but I suspect that shipping solar panels on a flatbed truck uses less energy than sending them into orbit. Plus, space-ready solar panels will need to be manufactured at unprecedented scale. Not insurmountable problems, but also maybe a distraction. We’ve barely scratched solar’s potential here on Earth, for example.

The perfect doesn’t have to be the enemy of the good. There’s plenty of room to improve things here on Earth even while we chase after our dreams in the stars. 

Just three years ago, Musk and his colleagues at Tesla released the “Master Plan Part 3,” which thoughtfully outlined a “plan to eliminate fossil fuels.” A good starting point might be xAI’s data centers.