In Part 4, John Collison asks whether Elon would try to solve the turbine shortage himself or go straight to manufacturing solar at enormous scale. Elon reveals that SpaceX and Tesla are already moving toward 100 gigawatts of solar cell production and explains why solar cells destined for space are dramatically cheaper and easier to produce than those on Earth. He also gives a detailed breakdown of why most people severely underestimate how much power a real AI data center actually requires.

Transcript:

John Collison suggested that the turbine blade bottleneck sounded like the kind of problem Elon would want to attack directly, and proposed that making solar themselves might be the smarter long-term path.

Elon Musk: “We are going to make solar. Okay, great. Both SpaceX and Tesla are building towards 100 gigawatts here of solar cell production.”

Dwarkesh Patel asked how deep into the supply chain they planned to go — from raw polysilicon all the way to finished solar panels.

Elon Musk: “I think you got to do the whole thing from raw materials to the finished cell. Now, if it’s going to space, it actually costs less. And it’s easier to make solar cells that go to space because they don’t need glass or they don’t need much glass and they don’t need heavy framing because they don’t have to survive weather events. There’s no weather in space. So it’s actually a cheaper solar cell that goes to space than the one on the ground.”

Elon emphasized that solar is already extremely cheap on Earth, but moving it to space changes the economics dramatically.

Elon Musk: “Solar cells are already very cheap. They’re like farcically cheap. And if you say, I think solar cells in China are around like 25, 30 cents a watt or something like that, it’s absurdly cheap. And when you take into account now put it in space and it’s five times cheaper because it’s five times — in fact, no, it’s 10 times cheaper because you don’t need any batteries. So the moment your cost of access to space becomes low, by far the cheapest and most scalable way to generate tokens is space. It’s not even close. It’ll be an order of magnitude easier to scale.”

He then shared the real-world difficulties his team faced just getting one gigawatt of power online for the Colossus supercluster.

Elon Musk: “And chips aside, an order of magnitude. The point is you won’t be able to scale on the ground. You just won’t. People are going to hit the wall big time on power generation. There already are. So the number of miracles in series that the xAI team had to accomplish in order to get a gigawatt of power online was crazy. We had to gang together a whole bunch of turbines. And then we had permit issues in Tennessee and had to go across the border to Mississippi, which is fortunately only a few miles away. But then we still had to run the high power lines a few miles and build a power plant in Mississippi. And it was very difficult to build that.”

Elon then explained why most people dramatically underestimate how much electricity is actually needed at the generation level to run a real AI data center.

Elon Musk: “And people don’t understand how much electricity do you actually need at the generator level, at the generation level in order to power a data center? Because they look at the specs, will look at the power consumption of say a GB 300 and multiply that by the number and then think that’s the amount of power you need.”

John Collison noted that even those calculations miss major additional loads like cooling and supporting systems.

Elon Musk: “Wake up. Yeah, that’s a total noob. You’ve never done any hardware in your life before. Besides the GB 300, you’ve got to power all of the networking hardware. There’s a whole bunch of CPU and storage stuff that’s happening. You’ve got to size for your peak cooling requirements. So that means can you cool even on the worst hours, the worst day of the year? Well, it gets pretty freaking hot in Memphis, so you’re going to have like a 40% increase on your power just for cooling.”

He continued breaking down the additional multipliers that are almost always overlooked.

Elon Musk: “Assuming you don’t want your data center to turn off on hot days and you want it to keep going, then you’ve got to say, well, there’s another multiplicative element on top of that, which is are you assuming that you never have any hiccups in your power generation? Like, oh, well, actually sometimes we have to take the generators, some of the power offline in order to service it. Oh, okay, now you add another 20, 25% multiplier on that because you’ve got to assume that you’ve got to take power offline to service it. So the actual — roughly every 110,000 GB 300s inclusive of networking, CPU, storage, cooling, margin for servicing power is roughly 300 megawatts.”

John Collison asked him to repeat the number for clarity.

Elon Musk: “It’s roughly — or think about it like a way to think about it is like 330,000. What you need at the generation level to service, probably service 330,000 GB 300s, including all of the associated support, networking and everything else, and the peak cooling and to have some power margin reserve is roughly a gigawatt.”

Elon breaks down why naive power calculations for AI data centers fall far short of reality and why space-based solar could be the only way to scale at the required speed. I

n Part 5, the conversation continues with more on the challenges and opportunities of building at this scale.