Jaden Schaefer

that's going to be kind of the big turning point he said you can mark my words in about 30 to 36 months the most cost effective place to run ai will be space he then went on to say that within five years more ai compute power is going to be launched and run in orbit each year than the total amount operating on earth i think for like context global data center capacity right now is a is expected to reach about 200 gigawatts by 2030 and that's you know close to a trillion dollars in kind of

ground-based infrastructure.

So if Elon Musk is predicting that he's effectively, I mean, he's basically arguing that there's going to be a massive chunk of that future investment that is going to not even be on earth.

Maybe, you know, half a trillion dollars a year is going to be spent on data centers in space.

I think obviously this is a vision that fits really nicely into SpaceX's business model, right?

They make money by launching things into space.

And so now if they own an AI company,

that needs massive amounts of compute power.

Launching things into space is kind of the best way for them to go about doing that.

But according to Bloomberg, this whole SpaceX-XAI merger values them at about $1.25 trillion, and it makes it the most valuable private company in the world.

SpaceX has reportedly been preparing for an IPO, which might happen in June, but Elon Musk didn't say whether the merger is going to change those plans in any way.

I think it is interesting that on this podcast recently when he was talking about all this, he was there with the co-founder of Stripe, which is one of the other biggest privately held companies, which a lot of rumors about when they might IPO are circulating out there.

Something that's really interesting is there was a memo that was kind of announcing this deal.

And Elon Musk basically framed the merger almost entirely around this kind of space-based data center.

And that's basically why he said they needed to merge.

And this is a quote from that memo.

He said,

Global electricity demand for AI cannot be met on Earth alone without putting pressure on communities and the environment.

And that's basically his argument, which of course is a little bit complicated.

Right now, we know that XAI has been accused of straining local infrastructure at their data center in Memphis, Tennessee.