Limitless Podcast - AI In Space: Google and SpaceX's Wild Plan To Fix Our Energy Crisis

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

It's a radical concept. Launching GPU-powered data centers into space highlights energy as the key resource for AI.Using insighs across basically every tech CEO, we explore the energy crisis facing AI labs and the potential of solar power in space.StarCloud, NVIDIA, SpaceX, Google’s Project Suncatcher, Microsoft. Every big name, and they're all talking crazy... but what if they're not?------⬇️LIMITLESS HQ: LISTEN & FOLLOW HERE ⬇️🎧 PODCAST: https://limitless.bankless.com/🗞️ NEWSLETTER: https://limitlessft.substack.com/📣 TWITTER: https://x.com/LimitlessFT------TIMESTAMPS0:00 Energy1:30 AI Data Centers in Outer Space7:02 StarCloud: The First Prototype12:12 SpaceX's Vision for Energy16:12 The Future of Quantum Computing18:53 Google's Project Suncatcher24:31 Pros and Cons31:29 Go Limitless------RESOURCESJosh: https://x.com/JoshKaleEjaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213------Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Everyone thinks that the most valuable resource in AI is the GPU. It's why Nvidia is worth $5 trillion, right? But what if I told you you're wrong? What if I told you that the most valuable resource in AI is actually energy? Without energy, you can't power these things. Without energy, the GPU is just a worthless piece of metal junk. And in fact, a lot of AI labs are facing this challenge where they just don't have enough energy to power the tens of billions of dollars of GPUs

that they've spent so far. In fact, Satya Nadella of Microsoft recently said that he has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Nvidia GPUs in his data centers collecting dust. Now, there are a bunch of efforts focused on solving this energy crisis. You've got nuclear energy. You've got renewable energy. But one particular solution that's taking up a lot of mine space with Elon Musk and Google is literally out of this world.

I've got six words for you. AI data centers in outer space. That is a real sentence that I've just said. It's the concept of putting GPUs in outer space to harness the energy of the sun for AI training and for AI inference. And whilst it might sound like a far-fetched idea, it's not when you consider that the resources needed on Earth to power up the data centers, which by the way are requiring as much energy as a mid to large city in the US. You might need to look at alternative resources for this, the one being the sun. And the economics kind of work out in theory. you have up to three to five times more energy efficiency.

If you operate GPUs above the Earth's atmosphere, then below it. So in this episode, we're going to dig into all things AI space data centers. Is this real? Is this achievable? Or is this kind of like a myth that we're going to laugh about and have pie on our face six months from now? Josh, you and I have a tumultuous relationship around this topic. I'm fired up. were optimistic. 50% of us, you were pessimistic about this. What's your take on all of this?

I was the biggest hater in the world. Space was so stupid. Why are we sending stuff to space when we have it all here on Earth? Well, my mind has changed. I have flipped 180 degrees. I'm pro-space. I'm ready to send these things to space tomorrow. I want all the data centers and out of space immediately. And when I was considering why, I did a lot of research, which we're going to get into in this episode, but there's this combination of things where there is a power grid straining on the U.S. where data centers now are one of the main drivers rising electricity demand. We can't fulfill all the electricity demand. There are limits on land, water, permitting, cooling.

And I was thinking, I was like, well, if your house is full of all these gaming PCs and the power keeps going out, well, you start to ask yourself, well, where else can we put them? And you're like on the roof, no, why don't we just send them off into outer space? And thankfully, because of new technologies like SpaceX, Starship, we can do this. So there are some benefits to space that I want to go over very quickly before we get into who's talking about this and who's doing this. One of them being the most important one, unlimited solar energy, a lot of people don't know

this, but 99.98% of the entire solar system is the sun, all of the mass of the solar system. It exists in the sun. And the sun is just this huge fusion reactor. And in fact, if you can get access to the sun from outside of our atmosphere, if you leave Earth's atmosphere and you go into just normal space, it's actually, eight times more powerful than on Earth. So if you remove the constraint of Earth's atmosphere,

immediately these solar panels get access to eight times more energy than they would have in the case of the around space. Space is also a vacuum, which means you can radiate heat directly into this empty space where there's nothing to worry about. There's no land. There's security and sovereignty, because let me tell you, it's a lot harder to hack a data center in outer space

than it is to do so here on Earth. So there's a lot of perks we're going to go through, but I want to hand it back to you to talk about who's been pro space? because there's some notable names that are very interested in the space race here. Yeah, there's a lot of people talking about this, Josh. Before we get into that, I kind of want to lay out that this is a very real problem and challenge. Because I'm sure a lot of people listen to this and thinking, well, like, I haven't heard any news about this.

Let me introduce you to some. There are two data centers that got permitted to build these data centers from 2019, by the way, Josh. There were hundreds of millions. I think like book value was like $500 million between. between both of them, they're collecting dust. There's no lights on in the data centers because they just can't get the energy supply to power these, right? And I think there's none other than Satchin Adela of Microsoft, which can explain succinctly

what exactly this problem is. I'm going to play a little clip right here. The biggest issue we are now having is not a compute glut, but it's a power. And it's sort of the ability to get the builds done fast enough close to power. So if you can't do that, you may actually have a bunch of choice. chips sitting in inventory that I can't plug in. In fact, that is my problem today, right? It's not a supply issue of chips. It's actually the fact that I don't have warm shells to plug into. And so how some supply chain constraints emerge tough to predict, because the demand is just going,

you know, is tough to predict. So he's not also the only one that's been talking about this, Josh. We've got the likes of SpaceX employees saying by 2045, we're going to need enough computers. to the base power of the entire planet to power all kind of like data center efforts. Elon Musk says that there'll probably be electricity shortages in about two years time. Sam Olman says we need to make a breakthrough whether it's through fusion or something else.

Mark Zuckerberg says, listen, we would build a bigger data center but we just don't have the energy to supply. So this is obviously something that is captivating some of the brightest entrepreneurial minds in the world right now when it comes to scaling AI. And we see this at the infrastructure level as well.

You just heard Satcher talk about something called the PowerShell. What he's referring to here is not even just the energy supply lines that you need to feed electricity into these data centers. There's also like the manual labor, Josh. There is the technicians, the specialists that you need to kind of like boost this entire thing. There's so many missing gaps here that we just don't meet it. It's funny when I was in school, BOSIS and like specialty job training was very popular. And that's kind of where you learn to become an electrician or a plumber. and a lot of these people, they didn't accrue a lot of debt, they left school early,

and they have well-paying jobs now. And it turns out, in a world of post-a-high, where we have AGI and the robots haven't quite made it here, the people who we need the most, are the electricians, are the plumbers, are the people who can do the cooling, the heating, the electricity wiring. Those are the most valuable jobs in the world, and the people are going to pay a tremendous amount of money. Now, before we get into this next section, I do want to frame a new question that we're going to answer a little bit later, but it's the actual narrative of space, because a lot of people are trying to raise a tremendous amount of money,

which requires a tremendous amount of optimism from the investors and the public. And you have to ask the question, is this a real narrative or is this kind of an exponential kind of like moonshot guess, moonshot like kind of play that they're targeting to get people interested to raise more money to build their AI? I don't want to answer that yet. We're going to answer that as we go. But by answering it, we're going to start with the first company who's actively doing this, which is a project called StarCloud.

Now, StarCloud is the first prototype, as far as I'm aware of EGAS, right, that's doing this? Can you tell me a little bit more about it? For sure, yeah. So StarCloud is kind of what triggered this entire debate online, Josh. Prior to Star Cloud announcing their prototype of launching a GPU in outer space, everyone was kind of like oblivious to this entire thing.

And then Google and Enoll Musk chined in after it. So these are the pioneers. And they kind of pioneered it with this prototype, which should already be launched in November, actually, which is they launched. an Nvidia H-100 GPU, which is technically the most powerful computer that's ever existed in outer space into outer space using Elon Musk's SpaceX Shuttle. And they ran a Google open source model called Gemma. So it's currently live and up there running. And the reason why this is such a big

deal is it's mainly a testing phase to see if GPUs can survive in outer space. It's running on its own, it's training on its own, it's being iterated to on its own outside in space, whilst communicating to their servers on Earth. And what they're really trying to figure out here is, number one, is it feasible? Or will this GPU just die from radiation? We're going to get into some of the challenges in a second. And number two, does it make economical sense? Like, if we can do this with one GPU, can we scale this to hundreds of thousands of GPUs? So they're the real ones, Josh, that started this trend. The initial thing that I found funny about StarCloud was the 16 square kilometer heat diffuser. That was kind of where I got cut up on, where 5 gigawatts of energy

means 16 square kilometers of metal that it took to diffuse this, because again, in space, there is no atmosphere. There is no place to cool it besides shooting the radiation off into deep space. It's not like you can run like cold air over this because there is no air. So I think as I've kind of learned more about the StarClaude project, I've started to realize like, okay, that's kind of within reason. And that's an early prototype in how they're going to go about actually dissipating heat. So six square miles of solar panels, they folded into a rocket, they could send it out on a starship. It's like, it's pretty cool. It seems like it makes sense. Ejas, is there anything that I'm missing here that technically doesn't make a whole lot of sense

based on these posts? Yeah, I mean, you nailed a technical challenge number one, which is like these deployable structures are not only so large for the amount of compute that it's supposedly meant to be supporting. Like, these things, like you said, are 16 square kilometers. That is huge to fuel. Do you know how much power it fuels actually, Josh? It's like, what's it, one gigawatt? Or is it less than that? Like, maybe 100 kilowatts? It's showing five gigawatts now for the data center. Yeah. Which is pretty sensitive. Okay, right, four by four. Yeah. So that's technical challenge number one. And then technical challenge number two down here is the radiation that you mentioned, which is basically, you know, you have all these kind of like nuclear and atoms flying around, which can really mess with

the composure and structure of these data centers. Radiation is a very real issue in spaces. Why you have all these different space suits and insulation. So if you expose hardware to this and it kind of messes up with any kind of the machinery of it's doing its job, then it becomes more and more implausible. But these are things that they, but kind of at like the frontier testing in terms of research, we haven't really found a resolution just yet. There are solutions like kind of like cooling that you mentioned, but otherwise there's no clear cut solution. Yeah. Okay. But there is another company that we're all familiar with that does have a seemingly more clear cut solution and a seemingly or a clear roadmap, which I believe the CEO goes by the name of Elon Musk, if I'm not mistaken.

And Elon and SpaceX have a strategy. We have a clip here that I think you wanted to share. Maybe we could start there and we'll get into how exactly this is all going to work. In order to harness a non-trivial amount of the energy of the sun, you have to move to solar-powered AI satellites in deep space, which somewhat is a confidence of Tesla expertise and SpaceX expertise. and XAI on the AI front. So there's three critical pillars that Elon mentioned in that little summary. There's Tesla, SpaceX, and XAI. SpaceX is the single most important pillar in that

because without the ability to get mass to orbit, it is impossible to build these data centers in the first place. And the reason why the window is just barely starting to open is because we're able to get the cost per kilogram down, low enough to make it economically viable. Because when we started with the space shuttle, EJA, it costs $60,000 per kilogram to get something into orbit. Nothing is going to make that viable if it costs $60,000 per kilogram

because these data centers are very, very heavy, and so are the solar panels, so are the battery, so all of that. Falcon Heavy, which is SpaceX's newer rocket, got that cost down to $1,500 per kilogram. So we've already seen like a few orders of magnitude to decrease, and Starship, which we've covered in previous episodes, that is planning to go to Mars and beyond, it's still not working, but they're planning to get it fully reusable by next year. That brings the cost per kilogram down to $10 per kilogram, which is the

window that enables this conversation to happen. Because in the absence of Starship, we cannot send mass to orbit at scale. With Starship working, we can actually talk about sending these data centers into space. And that's a hugely powerful unlock that only exists because of SpaceX, which is why I think it's important to pay attention to Elon when he talks about this stuff, because he's the one who's enabled this to even be a possible conversation. Earth gets only one to two billionth of the Sun's energy. So if you go a million times Earth's capacity, you must go into space is kind of thinking, where in order to scale AI to the size that we want, in order for true AGI,

for AI that scales infinitely with us, we need to go past Earth's ability to generate energy and we need to go out into the stars. And that's kind of the thesis with Elon and the XAI thing. Got it. I mean, I was just looking at this other post, Josh, where StarCloud is kind of laying out the economics for their kind of projections. And they say something pretty similar, which is like on Earth, it costs near like $200 million to kind of run a 40 megawatt data center for 10 years. Technically or theoretically in orbit, it would be worth $8.2 million, which is 20 times cheaper. So what I'm hearing from you and the Elon case is that, well, number one, he's going to be the toll master. He's going to be. basically own the highway into space. He's the Jensen Wong of space. He's the Jensen Wong of space. That's perfect. We have to trademark that term. He's the Jensen Huang of space. That's crazy good. So he's going to not only own that tall, but the other thing, Josh, which I know we both love the idea of, and which he actually commented on in this tweet, he says, simply scaling up

Starlink V3 satellites, which are the main satellites that he deploys from his SpaceX launches, will have high-speed laser links which would work. And what he's referring to here is work in terms of like a interconnected network. So these satellites would beam lasers to each other, one terabit per second speeds to be able to train or inference AI models up at that level. So imagine like a satellite network kind of in space orbiting Earth that you can use to beam terabits worth of data at super rapid speeds between each other satellites, train your AI model, and then beam it back down to Earth,

which just sounds so nuts at this point, Josh, that I can't quite wrap my head around. And then the third thing that he's talked about, Josh, I don't know if you saw this, he's talking about quantum computing on the dark craters of the moon. Can you, sorry, can you help me wrap my head around this? What the hell is this? What's this content? I'm pulling a number out of thin air. I believe it's right, though, where the craters, there are craters in the moon.

So there is no dark side of the moon, but there are, craters that never see the sun, those craters exist at a perpetual negative 200 degrees Celsius. They are literally frozen solid. There is no heat that gets in or out. And if you can place a gigantic data center in one of those craters at negative 200 degrees Celsius or whatever the exact amount is, you have a pretty good cooling system. Like, it's not that bad. And as you'll often see with quantum computers, there's this huge mechanism on top of them. And then there's this tiny little chip at the bottom, the entire mechanism on top of it is just to keep it cool. The actual chip is the size of a normal chip.

But because it's so important and so necessary to get quantum computing chips at solid zero so that the qubits don't move around too much, that's why they need it. So there is a world in which quantum computing makes sense if we can get it into outer space. There is some data and energy notes that Elon has that I wrote down that I want to share briefly because this is also fascinating. And he said, Starship should be able to deliver around 300 gigawatts per year of solar power to AI satellites to orbit, maybe 500 gigawatts. So if this is true, within a few years of full-rate Starship launches, orbital AI could rival or exceed entire country's electrical consumption. So the scale of this is outrageous.

And granted, this is all very optimistic. This is all very forward-looking, very sci-fi-esque. but in the case that is even directionally correct, the next 10 to 20 years of these launches, the next 10 to 20 years of compute, can scale in a really exciting way. And we were talking to Luke who helps produce the show right before this, and he made a great point that said,

in order to get exponential gains in progress, you need exponential gains in technology or something along those lines, and it's so true, where if we really want to build AI that changes the trajectory of the universe, you need to do something novel, something new, and doing this all in space

and unlocking this new energy source feels like the natural progression given where we are in terms of technological capability back here on Earth. It's also equally fair to say that Elon sometimes gets ahead of himself. Like he can see the vision, right?

But his projections are way too near term to what it actually requires to get to that point. And I wish I could critique him, Josh, except that there's also another person which is bullposting about AI data centers in space. And it is Sundar from Google,

the CEO of Google, who, pretty much every single interview, this clip that I'm showing you on the screen right now is from an interview he did literally yesterday, which has got nothing to do with Google's AI space efforts specifically, but he had to shell Google's project called Project Suncatcher, where they are also aiming to put Google's TPUs, which is their GPU equivalent, into space so that they can harness the power of the sun. There are too many important people talking about these things, Josh, where like my inner, kind of like half my brain is kind of fighting against this saying this is absolutely

ridiculous, but the other half, I think, is overwhelmingly now in favor of this thing might actually work. Yeah, it's their moonshot. It's another Google moonshot. And again, I'm going to tease the question, is this just a narrative thing to get people excited to invest more in their companies? Or is this real technology? Maybe we'll see he is partnering with planet, a company named Planet, and their plan is to launch two prototype satellites by early 2027 to test CPUs and optical links to orbit and see how that works. In the previous example with SpaceX, you mentioned that there is these space lasers that can talk to each other. A cool thing is that you can communicate at the speed of light. There is no kind of interference in space. So the time that it takes for a photon to get from one laser to,

or one satellite to the next is the latency between the two, which is very, very fast. So there is a world in which theoretically, if you're looking at this from first principles, there are no laws of physics that are being violated in order to do this. So therefore, it's a matter of technical capability, technical prowess, and our intellectual ability to actually figure out and solve these problems. It's funny seeing Google and Elon kind of converge on this. I assume, like you mentioned earlier, a lot of other companies are not far behind. They just don't quite have the infrastructure or the ability to tackle a problem like this, but it seems very real. And they're planning to do this as soon as the next 24 months with the new TPs that we've been talking about so often.

Sundar said that they're already prototyping a bunch of radiation measures on ground here at Earth to make sure that their TPUs can survive. So the next natural step there is to launch these babies into space, probably using Elon Musk's SpaceX because he is the Tomlmas. He's the Jensen 1. And to that point, actually, the economics and the launch costs. We actually, we have a quote here that says, their modeling says if launch costs get under $200 per kilogram to orbit by the mid-2030s, then space-based compute could be comparable to Earth data centers on a per kilowatt per year basis. So if we can get 20 times more than what Elon's projecting. So if the cost is pretty high, so if it's 20 times more expensive than what Elon's projecting, in a decade from now, then we'll have parity with Earth.

So it gives you a testament to like the timelines of this. And maybe this is a good time to go into the pros and cons of what is good about this, what is bad about this, and maybe humble people a little bit, EJZ, if you want to start with the cons, as to why this isn't as rosy as we think it might be. Like maybe bring us back down to Earth, in fact. That's where I did not expect that part, Josh. Okay, right. So I'm going to start off with the bear case here, which you've mentioned a few times,

which is this is just a narrative play by some of the biggest companies to boost their valuations. And let me explain the problem to you, right? Up until today, speaking about these data centers in space, the focus has been on GPUs. GPUs is the new gold, right? It's what you need to kind of train your AI. And then we found out that they don't have enough energy to kind of like fuel these things. Now, the reason why this is so important, as this post explains, is a lot of these companies, Sundar's company, Google, Elon Musk's companies, are valued based on the amount of GPUs they've been purchasing. And the Wall Street analysts have basically assumed, okay, the amount of GPUs that this company buys is equal to the economic output.

I can do a simple formula, right? if they're buying these GPUs, they're going live. What they haven't factored in is that these GPUs aren't going live. They're just sitting, collecting dust. And so that's less ROI per quarter than they're initially projected, which means that the valuations of these companies should probably be lowered. So what's the countermeasure to this, Josh? Well, obviously it's infinite energy.

Obviously, it's, what was that? 99.98% of the solar system is the sun. It's all that energy. So if you can miraculously, wow, now figure out a way to harness that energy, you can now maintain that valuation, dare I say, boost the valuations, right? Share price go up after you hear Sundar talking about this. Google's on an absolute run. So that's my skeptics take.

I think that they might be kind of like feeling this narrative, which they know is a decade out from any kind of real prototype being out there that scales. So that's my back is. Do you agree? Do you disagree with this? Yeah, I think setting expectations on timing is probably going to be fairly important. Because, again, like Satya is saying mid-20, 2030s, I mean, Elon's probably saying tomorrow, but the reality is it's probably mid-2030s. It's

going to take a while to get all this stuff to orbit and do it at scale that's comparable to the United States. Now, when I think about that, I think about what does the world of AI look like in the mid-2030s? Like, what are we, what's it going to look like here? Like, we're moving so fast. And to project 10 years into the future, my God, I don't know what the world looks like. So energy bill is going to be 5x, Josh. Or maybe we have people like Isaiah Taylor, who was on the show last week, solving nuclear reactors right here on home. And we actually have energy abundance. That's enough for our midterm goals prior to extending out to the long-term goals.

Maybe this is a fun time to talk briefly about that Cardishev scale, which is a sci-fi thing, and there's three tiers to it. The first one being, you can harness the entire energy of your planet, and then it's the energy of your sun, and then the energy of your solar system. we have been able to collect perhaps a very small fraction of Carderchard Shev Level 1, which is of the planet, the energy that hits our planet. So there's a very long way to go, but I think this is kind of like the grand sci-fi vision that gets people excited, gets people motivated. If I'm going to work at a company like SpaceX, I'm stoked at the idea of building superintelligence in outer space. That's a cool mission to have. And like so many of the other missions, it's not physics constrained. It is possible.

You can do this thing if you can figure out how to create the technology. to do it. So I love the ambition. Is it a narrative play to get more money? Maybe, probably. But in the case of Google and Tesla and SpaceX, it doesn't seem that way. If this was coming from someone like open AI or perplexity or anthropic, I would feel a little bit differently about it. But Google's always had a moonshot division since the beginning of time. I mean, that's the reason why AI exists in the current state it does today is because they spend so many resources on research and development. And if you remember from our episode yesterday, EJA, they developed the first neural network 15 years ago. They did. So it's been under development for a long time, and this very much feels like a

similar project where these timelines are going to be 10 to 15 years, but the research starts now, and it's very important research because directionally, it feels like this is correct. Directionally, we're going to need more energy than we can have on Earth, even if we solve nuclear power because of the hope that it's going to require so much energy to power super intelligence that will be smarter than the smartest thing on Earth. And it's just, it's a fun science experiment, maybe it's a narrative violation because they're getting a little ahead of the gun. But, you know, it could be, and I like this future. So do I. I think my optimistic take on this is all of these things, nuclear fission, nuclear power coming into like a scalable means,

renewable energy, and, you know, harnessing energy from the sun all comes collectively at a time in the mid-2030s where our energy bills are going through the roof and we cannot afford anything else. We need to rely on another energy source. And I think it's all going to neatly come at the right time, Josh. I don't know what makes me think that this might actually happen, but I think we are well on our way to do that. But to your point, there's a bunch of challenges, right? So we've mentioned kind of like some engineering challenges around protecting against radiation and building and deploying these infrastructures out in space. Right now, it's too expensive, right? But the idea is presumably using SpaceX's, I'll call it the tunnel to space or the highway to space.

it'll eventually reduce the cost down by maximum weight. So we're able to kind of achieve this. The other thing is kind of like maintenance, right? So it's like a lot of these things require a lot of attention. Like we mentioned earlier that, you know, supplying energy is just one thing. You need to have technicians and experts on there that can like kind of connect the right plugs between satellites and make sure that they speak to each other or GPUs between each other. Are we going to have astronauts roaming around these data centers on space?

That is kind of harder to wrap my head around because it just seems infeasible. We don't do that right now. why would it be in 10 years time? Maybe it will be. I'm being optimistic. I have to maintain optimism here, Josh. Maybe robots. Robots in 10 years.

Probably going to be pretty good. Oh, Josh. I need to buy more Tesla. The humanites. I need to buy more Tesla. You've just, the humanoids. Oh, God. We're getting way too bullshit on the con section.

On the con section. Okay, hang on. We've got to remain tethered to Earth. Speaking of tethering to Earth, actually, how do we get this data and compute that we generate in space down back to Earth? Presumably the majority of the humans are still going to be on Earth, right? Josh. So a question that's in my mind is like, what is the receiving infrastructure of this look like? And is that economically feasible? Elon seems to claim so in that in that thread that

we showed earlier. And Sundar has said multiple times that, yeah, we can just beam data down. We can just beam some of the learnings that compute down. I don't know if anyone's actually proven that. And it's because we need to do step one first, which has launched the data center in space. So there's so much that this relies on that needs to be kind of solved fire frontier research that we're kind of hoping for, but we haven't got any definitive proof if that makes sense. So if you're investing in this stuff, it's definitely a longer horizon type thing. Yeah, conceptually, it all makes sense. We're learning a lot from Starlink, actually, in terms of latency and sending things back

to Earth, where if you're sending data that's timely, it's a little difficult because there are tens to hundreds of milliseconds that are added in the latency between the two. But if you're batch training, if you're just training mega amounts of AI and then you're beaming them in batches down to Earth, there's enough bandwidth. if you disregard latency to send quite a bit of data pretty quickly. So I suspect there's some healthy middle ground there where they'll talk to each other very fast and they'll beam data down kind of slow and that will be okay. There are pros.

There's lots of pros. We talked about a few, energy abundance being one, cooling being one where you can just create mega radiators, you could send things on the dark side of the moon, put them in craters where it's really cold. The environmental thing, there's, you don't need permits or you don't need to use water or you don't need energy. We're just unobstructed by AI. which is kind of an interesting thing because currently AI is very intrusive. It uses a tremendous

amount of data and resources and energy and just human labor, which maybe is a good thing to some extent. But that's another thing. And then we have just like the sovereignty and resilience point, where when stuff is in space, it is pretty anti-fragile. No one's really going up there to mess with it. It is very secure. You kind of know what you're getting when it's up there. You set it, you forget it. It's a nice thing. So that's kind of how I think we would weigh the pros and cons. Okay, so if those are the pros and those are the cons, the next natural question for me, Josh, is, like, if I was an analyst looking at this over the next, say, like, five to ten years, what kind of milestones should I be looking for? Like, do you have any idea of what's, like, what's sense of, I guess? Is it like an entire data center out there? Or is it a couple of GPUs? What is it? Yeah, so because there are a few companies that are actively working on this problem, we could just kind of evaluate their progress as I think a way of tracking things. So we could set a few milestones, starting with the suncatcher. prototypes who are planned to go up in 2027.

So if you're trying to map out trajectories, we have Project Suncatcher. We could ask the question, did the 27 Suncatcher prototypes launch on time? Did they actually even make it to outer space? Is Starship working? Are they able to carry the correct payloads? Is the payload even able to get into outer space? Then once it's in outer space, we can ask the question. Well, does it actually work?

Is it able to shield itself from radiation? Is it able to power itself on? Is it able to cool itself down? Do they show working optical links and TPs in orbit? Can they actually make that work? So we have the prototypes of Suncatcher. Then we want to look at Starship cadence. Is Starship actually getting the cost of orbit low enough to make this economically viable?

That I think actually is the single most important thing to look out for is the Starship program. If you are not watching every Starship launch with us on this show, you are missing out because we're going to cover every single one. It's the most important thing to the progress of this project. and we are going to closely monitor how the cost per kilogram to orbit is going. As long as that number is going down, as long as starships start blowing up less, that's going to be a huge win and that's going to make it at least plausible. And then the third thing I guess to monitor is the power crisis on Earth. We want to see how much power we're able to generate outside of these moonshot ideas.

So are people like Isaiah Taylor of Val are able to create modular nuclear reactors to power gigawatts of these data centers and eventually terawatts? are we able to use natural gas turbines and other forms of renewable energy to not only power data centers, but our day-to-day lives? Can we do so without making the electricity bills run too high? So I think the convergence of these three things are things to look out for that we can monitor that will probably give us a better idea of the roadmap how we're going in the trajectory. And again, 10 years from now, who knows what the world looks like? But that's what I'm going to be looking out for, at least.

Yeah, I think that last point is actually one of the most important things, because maybe this is a hot take, but I think that, the AI data centers in space hype dies down if things like nuclear and renewables can scale on Earth. Because people aren't going to focus on things in outer space if they can just kind of fix the thing on problem with Earth. I think this is more of a philosophical semantic thing due to human nature versus kind of doing something in the sky where they haven't spent that much time out there. Right. And then the other thing is like, to your point, we've got to reduce the cost of space travel, which I fully believe Elon's going to do, but he has to prove it before people get

really bullish and confident that this can be a thing. But that's it. Those are the pros and cons, and that is the thesis and the pitch, the for and against for AI data centers in outer space. It's so funny seeing our evolution and reaction to this, Josh, given that six weeks ago, we were absolutely laughing at this when StarCloud announced that they were launching an H-100 GPU in space. And now here we are opining about, you know, Elon being the toll master, it being cheap enough to launch. data centers in space and then figuring out how to beam down terabits of data to Earth. Just an insane thing that I can't quite wrap my head around. But it's been a super fun episode.

And just like the trajectory of putting data centers in outer orbit, there's something else that is reaching the levels and that is exiting the stratosphere. Josh, it is the limitless follower page. It is our social pages. It is our YouTube pages. We have gained, I think, what was it, 3,000 subscribers over the last couple of, More? How about, tell me. Over 4K. And that's not enough because 80% of those people are still not subscribed who are listening to the episode.

So if you're listening on YouTube, please make sure not only click the subscribe button, but there's a little bell next to it, which means you could turn on notifications to get notified whenever a new episode comes out. Happens three times a week. They're all pretty good. They normally range from 25 to 35 minutes. And if you enjoy them with your friends, you should share them along because it really makes a big difference to the growth of this podcast. And we're trying to grow. We're trying to make this the biggest thing. ever. We've installing out a little on the audio front. So if you do prefer to listen to it as a podcast, perhaps go find it on your favorite podcast player, like Apple Podcasts or PocketCast is my preferred one. Those are good places to find out and hang out with us. But yeah, I think that's mostly 80s. Do you have any parting words? Because I actually have one parting story. So you go first. Okay. One final thing is we also have a newsletter and we have about 70,000 of you tuning in every single week. Josh, either Josh and I write an essay or a thesis on

what we think the future of AI is going to look like. Our last one is a juicy bull case on Anthropic. You go check it out. And we give you the five highlights of the week. So we are anywhere and everywhere that you could possibly ingest information about AI and frontier tech. Follow. Subscribe. Give us your email list.

Josh, what is your parting words? Yeah, there's actually a lot of alpha in there. EJES, you wrote the Google bowl case like four or five weeks ago. And the price has gone off like 20% since then. So if you're not listening to the or reading the newsletter, I would advise. I wanted to leave with one little bit of sci-fi. because when I do episodes like this, I'm always reminded of sci-fi. Like when I look at the future, I'm always reminded of sci-fi books.

And a lot of them get it wrong. But I think you could almost always find a sci-fi story that will map to the reality that we're having currently. And you kind of see this with Black Mirror. One of them that I would encourage everyone to read, it's called The Last Question by Isaac Asmov. And it's where I see this going as we move AI into space, where he kind of like tracks the progress of humanity over millions of years.

And each time there is a smarter and smarter and smarter AI. And it is an all-knowing form of intelligence. and every time it gets smarter because they've been able to capture more and more energy. And eventually it leads to the last question, which is the last question humanity will ever need to answer, which I will leave that for you guys to explore and to uncover for yourself. But it is like, it's so exciting that we get to live in this world that feels like a sci-fi novel, where we're actually talking about sending AI into outer space, building artificial general intelligence, doing so using space rockets and satellites. It's like, it's really cool. And it's not here today,

but there is a very clear trajectory to getting there in the future. So I think that's mostly what we are excited about covering. And I think the people who have been here with us long enough understand that. And they're excited to be on the journey with us. So for all of you who have made it this far, through our fairly long episode today, thank you. I hope you enjoyed the space race. Our AGI in space episode. I hope you left informed, excited, optimistic, or just downright frustrated that we are missing the mark so much. And AI in space is stupid. But whichever one it is, let us know in the comments down below. And we will see you guys. in the next one. Thank you so much for watching.