Blaise Agüera y Arcas

speaker

213 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 31 Jul

Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Freakonomics Radio · 682. Should A.I. Move to Space? · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

It's very energetically costly to lift mass into space.

So...

None of this makes sense unless you think a that it's going to continue to get cheaper to move mass into orbit as it has been there's been an incredible decline in cost over the last 10 years thanks in large part to SpaceX and we believe that will continue to be the case for some years to come.

So you have to believe in declining costs to launch, but you also have to believe that you can do an orbiting data center in a much more physically lightweight way than a terrestrial data center.

So what would your data centers look like?

They're not buildings.

They're something very, very different.

No, they're not buildings.

In the beginning, they look like dragonflies.

So with giant but very, very thin solar wings and with a body in the center where the computing happens and the body should be as lightweight as possible.

Basically, you need as much area as you can for solar collection.

You also need area in order to radiate heat, but then you want your mass to be as small as possible.

When you put all those constraints together, it turns out that you can design satellites using today's technologies that put you on the right side of the economics with some pretty modest assumptions over the next decade.

You have to obviously work through a lot of the details of the orbital mechanics of this.

There are also many other things to think about, like safety of the low Earth orbit environment.

You want to make sure that you're not creating space junk because with massive numbers of satellites, you want to be very careful that collisions are extremely, extremely rare because those are super costly.

They create a lot of pollution in low Earth orbit.

And you want to be sure that if the worst happens, if there is a collision, it doesn't result in a catastrophe where we end up with all kinds of junk that makes that extremely valuable real estate around the earth that poisons the well for us and for everybody else.

So there are many important considerations.

The swarm has to be self-organizing in a lot of ways.

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