Philip Johnston

Well, some forecasts suggest that over the next just three years alone, we will need an additional 50 to 100 gigawatts or 50 to 100 new nuclear power stations in just the US alone to meet the coming demand for AI.

Permitting and other constraints mean that this is not possible.

And this is basically leading to a dramatic rise in energy prices, and we also are sucking up rivers and reservoirs to keep these data centers cool.

A few weeks ago, I was invited down to Tucson, Arizona, to meet with community leaders there.

Tucson recently became the first city in the US to unanimously vote to reject a new data center proposal, a gigawatt-scale data center proposal, in their community, primarily due to concerns about energy and water usage.

I spoke with many members of the community.

They had been shocked to find out that this new data center proposal would have put a strain on energy and water in the community that would have been a detriment for generations to come.

And it's not just Tucson.

This is happening in towns and cities across the US and across the world.

Now if you've ever seen a data center, you will know that they are massive.

So it can be pretty difficult to imagine what this kind of data center could look like in space.

And so I would like to show you a short 15 second clip of what a huge five gigawatt data center in space might look like.

So here you see a starship-sized spacecraft, and I'll talk about this later, with a 100 ton module of chips connecting to a five gigawatt cluster with a four kilometer solar panel with a one kilometer radiator.

And don't worry, this won't block out the sun or anything.

When we first released this video a year and a half ago as part of our Y Combinator launch, we got roundly pilloried from all corners.

I thought I would share with you a few of the more polite X comments that we got a year and a half ago.

This got to be the dumbest shit.

This got to be the dumbest shit I ever seen or heard.

Fair enough, fair enough, each has their own opinion.

I thought you nerds were supposed to be good at science.