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xAI joins SpaceX

spacex.com

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Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#271

Post by xeromal »

protastus wrote: post #106
Buttons840 wrote: post #50

SpaceX is too big to fail. It's important for national security. I wonder if Elon wants to tangle all his businesses into SpaceX so they are all kept afloat by SpaceX's importance.

Elon can't legally financially entangle Tesla to SpaceX due to Tesla being a public company, so his hands are tied. Tesla is clearly benefiting from protectionism and its sales would collapse if BYD were allowed to openly sell in the US. Most people just want affordable, maintainable and reliable cars.

It's "ironic?" considering Tesla launching in China is what created the necessary supply chain to turn BYD into the powerhouse it is today. Tesla's greed will become their own demise.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#272

Post by itsprobablyok »

awesome_dude wrote: post #205
Buttons840 wrote: post #50

SpaceX is too big to fail. It's important for national security. I wonder if Elon wants to tangle all his businesses into SpaceX so they are all kept afloat by SpaceX's importance.

SpaceX is slated to go public some time this year - June IIRC The biggest selling point /was/ that Musk was being managed there, he wasn't tinkering with SpaceX like Twitter or Tesla, and his foolhardy direction was kept out of the company. BUT, like Tesla, Musk cannot help himself and is making SpaceX look like a very bad investment - tying his other interests with SpaceX, allegedly using SpaceX money as a "war ches…

They want to go public, but have to sell the hell out of it in the meantime.

I'll bet SpaceX financials aren't as great as some people think. Remember, Elon was the guy who tried to take Tesla private, and talked a lot of smack about how silly it is to be a public company. All of a sudden he wants SpaceX to go public?

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#274

Post by adastra22 »

TehCorwiz wrote: post #247
SimianSci wrote: post #113

The Goalpost shift continues, If elon were working for me, I would have fired him for having never delivered on any of his projects. Hyperloop > Neuralink > Self-Driving Cars > Robotaxi fleets > Personal Robots > Orbital Datacenters > [Insert next]

Hey now. Huperliop was designed to scuttle California’s light rail project. Which it did. Mission accomplished.

What are you talking about?

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#275

Post by Wowfunhappy »

rybosworld wrote: post #169
wongarsu wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You operate them like Microsoft's submerged data center project: you don't do maintenance, whatever fails fails. You start with enough redundancy in critical components like power and networking and accept that compute resources will slowly decrease as nodes fail No operational needs is obviously ... simplified. You still need to manage downlink capacity, station keeping, collision avoidance, etc. But for a large con…

An 8 GPU B200 cluster goes for about $500k right now. You'd need to put thousands of those into space to mimic a ground-based data center. And the launch costs are best case around 10x the cost of the cluster itself. Letting them burn up in the atmosphere every time there's an issue does not sound sustainable.

Playing devil's advocate, when a GPU dies you don't typically fix it, right? You just replace it.

What if you could keep them in space long enough that by the time they burn up in the atmosphere, there are newer and better GPUs anyway?

Still doesn't seem sustainable to me given launch costs and stuff (hence devil's advocate), but I can sort of see the case if I squint?

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#276

Post by moeadham »

gok wrote: post #45

> it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon. edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial…

In fairness, solar cells can be about 5x more efficient in space (irradiance, uptime).

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#277

Post by jdminhbg »

TehCorwiz wrote: post #247
SimianSci wrote: post #113

The Goalpost shift continues, If elon were working for me, I would have fired him for having never delivered on any of his projects. Hyperloop > Neuralink > Self-Driving Cars > Robotaxi fleets > Personal Robots > Orbital Datacenters > [Insert next]

Hey now. Huperliop was designed to scuttle California’s light rail project. Which it did. Mission accomplished.

This is the funniest conspiracy theory.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#278

Post by bakies »

seanalltogether wrote: post #160
Saline9515 wrote: post #28

I still don't understand the "data center in space" narrative. How are they going to solve the cooling issue?

Presumably the cooling problem gets hand waved away as a technical detail, and the real selling point is data centers that aren't subject to any regional governments laws.

So the csam generator can live on? Why not just pirate radio style it and cool it with ocean water....

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#279

Post by stevenjgarner »

This makes a lot of sense. The commercial launch business is not large enough to support all possible Falcon launches, so Starlink was created to take advantage of the low launch cost and vertical integration and is now a major profit center for SpaceX.

Starship launches are only going to make sense every 779.94 days (the approx 2 year Mars-Earth proximity). The rest of the time, the launches could similarly be used to deploy orbiting data centers for XAi/Grok etc. Brilliant move.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#280

Post by c22 »

wongarsu wrote: post #117
rybosworld wrote: post #70

> The basic math is that launching a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, with no ongoing operational or maintenance needs. Ultimately, there is a path to launching 1 TW/year from Earth. > My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space. This is so obviously false. Fo…

You operate them like Microsoft's submerged data center project: you don't do maintenance, whatever fails fails. You start with enough redundancy in critical components like power and networking and accept that compute resources will slowly decrease as nodes fail No operational needs is obviously ... simplified. You still need to manage downlink capacity, station keeping, collision avoidance, etc. But for a large con…

How many submerged datacenters is Microsoft operating?
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