Tag: AI Infrastructure

Elon Musk explains why SpaceX and Tesla may have to start manufacturing turbine components themselves and shares their aggressive plans to scale solar production.

Elon Musk with Dwarkesh Patel & John Collison – The Future of AI is in Space – Part 5: Turbine Shortages, Casting Bottlenecks & Scaling Solar Production (Full Transcript)

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In Part 5, Dwarkesh Patel raises the question of whether the engineering challenges of building large-scale AI infrastructure might actually be easier in space than on Earth. The conversation then turns to the very real bottlenecks on the ground. Particularly the massive shortage of turbines and specialized casting capacity. Elon Musk explains why SpaceX and Tesla may have to start manufacturing turbine components themselves and shares their aggressive plans to scale solar production.

Transcript:

Dwarkesh Patel asked a central question: while Earth-based power challenges are already enormous, wouldn’t building in space introduce entirely new and unprecedented engineering difficulties — such as radiation hardening, orbital lasers, and other issues that haven’t been solved before? He wondered why anyone would choose these novel challenges over simply building more turbines on Earth, where established companies already know how to manufacture them.

Elon Musk: “I invite again, try doing it and then you’ll see. So like, the turbines are sold out through 2030.”

John Collison asked whether they had considered manufacturing their own turbines.

Elon Musk: “I think in order to bring enough power online, I think SpaceX and Tesla will probably have to make the turbine blades, the vanes and blades internally.”

John Collison asked if Elon meant just the blades or the entire turbines.

Elon Musk: “The limiting factor, you can get everything except the blades. They call the blades and vanes. You can get that 12 to 18 months before the vanes and blades. The limiting factor of the vanes and blades, and there are only three casting companies in the world that make these and they’re massively backlogged, it is Siemens.”

John Collison asked whether it was GE and the big names or subcontractors.

Elon Musk: “No, it’s other companies. I mean sometimes they have a little bit of casting capability in house. But I’m just saying you can just call any of the turbine makers and they will tell you it’s not top secret. They’re probably on the, it’s probably on the internet right now.”

Dwarkesh Patel asked whether, if it weren’t for the tariffs, Colossus would be running on solar power.

Elon Musk: “It would be much easier to make it solar powered. Yeah, the tariffs are nuts, so several hundred percent.”

John Collison began to suggest that Elon surely knew some people who could help.

Elon Musk: “We also need speed. Yeah, no, you know, President has his, you know, we don’t agree on everything and this demonstration is not the biggest fan of solar. We also need the land, the permits and everything. So if you’re trying to move very fast, I do think scaling solar on Earth is a good way to go. But you do need some amount of time to find the land, get the permits, get the solar, pair that with batteries.”

John Collison pressed further, asking why not simply stand up their own massive solar production, noting there is plenty of private land in Texas and Nevada.

Elon Musk: “As I said, we are scaling solar production. There’s a rate at which you can scale physical production of solar cells where we’re going as fast as possible.”

John Collison confirmed they were building the solar cells domestically at Tesla.

Elon Musk: “Both Tesla and SpaceX have a mandate to get to 100 gigawatts a year of solar.”

Elon explains the severe turbine and specialized casting bottlenecks and why SpaceX and Tesla are aggressively scaling their own solar production to 100 gigawatts per year. In Part 6, the conversation continues with more on the engineering and infrastructure challenges of building AI at planetary scale.

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

Elon Musk with Dwarkesh Patel & John Collison – The Future of AI is in Space – Part 4: Turbine Bottleneck & Space Solar (Full Transcript)

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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.

Elon Musk on The Massive Scale of Power Requirements and Utility Bottlenecks

Elon Musk with Dwarkesh Patel & John Collison – The Future of AI is in Space – Part 3: The Massive Scale of Power Requirements and Utility Bottlenecks (Full Transcript)

Gail AlfarLeave a comment

In Part 3, the conversation turns to the enormous scale of power required to run advanced AI at the level Elon envisions. Dwarkesh Patel and John Collison press Elon on the real-world challenges of building terawatts of electricity generation and why the utility industry is such a major bottleneck. Elon explains why private power plants co-located with data centers may be the only practical solution.

Transcript:

Dwarkesh Patel sought clarification on the scale Elon was describing, confirming that he was talking about terawatts of power. The discussion then moved to the extreme difficulty of actually building that much electricity generation at the speed AI development requires.

Elon Musk: “Yeah, well, all of the United States currently uses only half a terawatt per hour on average. Right. So if you say a terawatt, that would be twice as much electricity as the United States currently consumes. So that’s quite a lot. And can you imagine building that many data centers, that many power plants? It’s like those who have lived in software land don’t realize that they’re about to have a hard lesson in hardware, that it’s actually very difficult to build power plants. And then you don’t just need the power plants, you need all of the electrical equipment, you need the electrical transformers to run the transformers, the AI transformers.”

Elon pointed out that the utility industry moves extremely slowly because it is heavily regulated and “impedance matched to the government.”

Elon Musk: “Now, the utility industry is a very slow industry. They impedance match to the government, to the public utility commission. So they’re very slow because their past has been very slow. So trying to get them to move fast is just like, you know, if you’re trying to do an interconnect agreement… have you ever tried to do an interconnect agreement with a utility at scale? Like with a lot of power?”

Dwarkesh Patel laughed and admitted that, as a podcaster, he had never tried to do an interconnect agreement with a utility.

“Now, the utility industry is a very slow industry. They impedance match to the government, to the public utility commission. So they’re very slow because their past has been very slow. So trying to get them to move fast is just like, you know, if you’re trying to do an interconnect agreement… have you ever tried to do an interconnect agreement with a utility at scale? Like with a lot of power?” – Elon Musk

Elon Musk: “In fact, yeah, they have to do a study for a year. Okay. Like a year later they’ll come back to you with their interconnect study.”

John Collison asked whether companies could simply bypass the utility bottleneck by building their own private power plants right next to the data centers.

Elon Musk: “You can build power plants. Yeah, that’s what we did at xAI for Colossus.”

John Collison followed up, asking why this private-power approach wasn’t being treated as the obvious solution to the utility problems they had been discussing.

Elon Musk: “Right. But it begs the question of where do you get the power plants? Where do you get the power plants from? I mean the power plant makers.”

John Collison summed up the deeper issue: there is currently a massive backlog for gas turbines and power plant equipment in general.

Elon highlights that even if companies build their own power plants, they still face major constraints in actually obtaining the equipment. In Part 4, the discussion continues with more on the practical challenges of scaling AI infrastructure at this level.