Space-based solar energy could power AI more efficiently than on Earth, with full implementation within two to three years, Elon Musk said last week in Davos, Switzerland. SpaceX’s Starship launch vehicle and its reusable rockets aim to greatly reduce the cost of access to space, enabling solar-powered AI satellites and possibly large-scale extraterrestrial energy infrastructure.
Greenland wasn’t the only frontier market in the spotlight last week at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. Tesla CEO Elon Musk told Larry Fink, interim WEF co-chairman and CEO of BlackRock, that solar energy could power space-based AI, with full implementation possible within two to three years.
“If you have solar in space, you get five times more effectiveness, maybe even more than that, than solar on the ground,” Musk said. “It’s always sunny, so you have no day-night cycle, seasonality or weather conditions and you get about 30% more energy in space because you don’t have atmospheric attenuation of the energy. The net effect is that each solar panel will use five times more energy in space than on the ground.”
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Space also offers excellent thermal conditions, according to Musk.
“It’s a no-brainer to build solar AI data centers in space because, as I said, it’s also very cold in space. If you’re in the shade, it’s very cold in space, 3 degrees Kelvin,” he explained. “So you have solar panels facing the sun and then a radiator facing away from the sun so there’s no sun coming in, so it just cools, it’s a very efficient cooling system. The net effect is that the lowest cost place to put AI will be in space and that will be the case in two to three years, three at the latest.”
But how do we get all this stuff into space? This is where Musk’s other major venture, SpaceX, comes into play. SpaceX plans a record public offering in 2026 and is on track to further cut what Musk calls the “cost of access to space.”
“Hopefully this year we can prove the full reusability of Starship, which would be a profound invention because the cost of access to space would drop by a factor of 100 if you achieved full reusability,” Musk said. “That makes the cost of access to space lower than, we think, the cost of freight on airplanes, easily below $100 per pound.”
Starship, the largest rocket ever built, would be used to deploy solar-powered AI infrastructure in space. Ultimately, similar infrastructure could be established on the moon and planets like Mars, especially as smart AI-powered robots become commonplace for building and maintaining these space-based assets. The first step on this roadmap appears to be solar-powered AI satellites.
“One of the things we’ll be doing with SpaceX in a few years is launching solar-powered AI satellites,” Musk said. “Space is really the source of enormous power, and then you don’t have to take up any space on Earth. There’s so much space in space, and you could scale up to eventually, I think, hundreds of terawatts per year.”
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