Steve Levitt

speaker

962 appearances 8 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 31 Jul

Steve Levitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 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

All the big AI companies have been scrambling to find reliable power sources.

Yes.

Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, they're all making big investments in nuclear power in various forms.

Microsoft even has plans to restart Three Mile Island, which seems like one of the odder choices.

But this all has to strike people as being pretty surprising, given that nuclear power has been mostly out of favor for a long time, at least in the U.S.

Another option would be to look to solar power, which has been expanding like crazy.

What are the pros and cons of solar power when it comes to these massive data centers?

So you've got a different solution in mind, and it's one that at first sounds completely ridiculous, I have to say.

What is Project Suncatcher?

So solar power works really great in space.

But the problem we've always had is that beaming energy in the same way that moving people or materials through long distances is not very efficient.

So what good does it do you to have this energy in space?

I'm just trying to imagine this, because I've seen these data centers, and they are not small buildings.

I mean, these are some of the biggest buildings that we ever built.

How are you going to do that in space?

And so this data center that you're imagining, it's not a single satellite.

No, it's a swarm.

How do you imagine controlling a swarm of satellites that are rocketing through space at many tens of thousands of miles an hour?

Can you just give us the broadest view of that?

of how you pull this off?

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