Greetings, Earthlings: Philip Johnston of Starcloud on Data Centers in Space

The problem with doing this build out on Earth is that like the marginal cost on every additional data center goes up every time you add one because we're using all the easy places to build energy projects. In space the marginal cost goes down for every additional unit because you're now you're manufacturing it rate and you're you know the more stars you see fly the cheaper the cheaper it gets and all the rest of it. And so there comes a crossover point where it just makes it makes a zero sense to continue building things on Earth and so I think it will be like close to a trillion dollars per year of cap expand within 10 years being deployed in space. So fly farther large more. We're thrilled to have with us today Philip Johnson founder and CEO of Starclad. You're the first to put up data centers in space and just a few months ago your first data center starclad one sent back the message to earth greetings earthlings or as I prefer to think of you a fascinating collection of blue and green what a poetic thing to think about AI and space looking back at us. Congratulations on what you've done I'm excited to ask you all about data centers in space for this episode maybe first to get started why build data centers in space. Yeah so firstly thanks so much for having me and it's pretty awesome to be here. So a quick background on myself I first I mean I've been interested in space my whole life and I actually spent a few years with McKinsey with the space agencies of the different governments around the world and that's where I started to notice that the launch cost was very rapidly coming down and so three years ago I kind of randomly on a weekend decided to try to trip down to starbase Texas where SpaceX is building the Starship launch vehicle and I think it just blew me away the scale of the new sort of gigafactories they're building I think they're planning to build three starships per day or something on that order and so the coming capacity and the potential launch cost is you know orders of magnitude off where it is today and so you know I started thinking about okay well what is that going to enable what new businesses will that enable and with my co-founder Ezra and Ezra and I go way back we grew up in the same place in the UK we started looking at the concept of space space solar which is where you have these huge solar panels in space and then you somehow beam that power down it's not really a new idea I mean people have been looking at this since I think Isaac Asmall in the 40s was talking about it the problem with space based solar is you lose most of the energy and transmission from space to earth and we very quickly realized okay well once we get that power down you know most new energy projects on earth today are being built to power data centers so either directly or indirectly that power is going to be going into data centers and so if we can find instead a cheap way to get the data center to space we don't lose all of that power and transmission we can consume that power close to the source and that then became the basis of a white paper that we put out in 2024 and from there that's how the company got going well let me ask you say there's a distinction I heard a lot in there on it is possible to do data centers in space yeah why do we need to do data centers in space maybe possible yeah why do we need to do it why do we need to go to space yeah that's a great question the main reason is we are very quickly running up against constraints on where and how we can build new energy projects to restaurant to power data centers so for example if you want to build a new hundred megawatt energy project you're looking at a five to ten year lead time just on the permitting particularly in North America and so for example if you want to cover 10 square kilometers of countryside with solar panels there's a lot of people who are going to be very annoyed about that and so you just have these you know we're we're very rapidly plowing towards a brick wall where it's going to be extremely difficult to build new energy projects we've already built in the easy places if we could weave a magic wand and remove the regulatory constraint what's the hex constraint we run into well it is actually just cheaper to build things in space once the launch cost gets below a certain point so for example with terrestrial solar which is the cheapest form of energy we have you've got three big costs the first one I mentioned which is the cost of permitted land the second is the cost of battery storage and backup power and then the last is the cost of the solar cells themselves so in space number one we don't need permitted land number two we don't need batteries and backup power because we're 24/7 in the sun and then lastly we need eight times less solar because one square meter of solar panel in space produces eight times the energy of one square meter of solar panel in earth and so there's a break even point where the launch cost which is our main additional cost in space where the launch cost comes below the cost of those three factors we see that break even to be around five hundred dollars a kilo but as the cost of permitted land goes up which it is going through the roof right now that break even point actually comes even closer to a thousand dollars a kilo but but as I say even if you're even if your permitted land cost is zero you still have those other two factors and so at some point if you're going to build data centers anywhere you know once the launch cost is below a few hundred bucks kilo you're going to do it in space because it's just cheaper what have you learned about maintenance in space yeah it's a great question as well and so for maintenance we'll be operating very similar to the way that Starlink satellites work in the in the initial years we're not going to have robotic maintenance or anything for the first few generations at least and so that means we need to have redundancy on the critical systems and then we over provision things which fail over time like solar panels you lose a few percent per year is very very important that the chips do not have a higher failure rate in space then they do on earth because the chips are one of the largest costs in this and so a huge amount of our time probably 70 70% of our engineering time is going on to the heat problem and the other 30% is going on to making the chips as reliable as possible in space and that means a whole bunch of testing in different particle accelerators if we did two rounds of testing at the cyclotron proton beam acceleration Knoxville one outer testing at the heavy iron particle particle accelerator and Brookhaven National Lab and we run it in 24 hours we can simulate five years worth of radiation and with that then all of that data then goes into informing our choice on shielding and other you know software for bit bit flip mitigations and things like that but in terms of what we've learned on the first satellite it's actually the H100 that we have on orbit right now and we've not had a single restart failure or or issue that needed a restart from the chip itself there are other areas which we may need to put a bit more attention to for example the power delivery and solid state drives but the actual chip itself is extremely resilient and GPU workloads in general are very resilient and the reason is they're stochastic in nature and so if you for example if you type into chat gbt write me a poem about space there will give you the two different poems the the quality of the poem will be identical will be the same you know we have the exact same quality of the output but the specific incidents will be different and so with a bit flip on any part of that or on most of the parts of that workload it actually doesn't make a difference to the quality of the output so so it's actually it's it's surprisingly resilient you said you spend the bulk of your engineering time on the heat problem yeah I think most people have this notion that you know space is cold and so they're for it to be easier problem when Sonya says most people I thought that was the case until a few until a few months ago so can you just talk about you know what exactly is the heat dissipation problem and what are you doing to solve it yeah for sure um so yeah as you mentioned space is cold and in general that's actually what once you get far enough down this rabbit hole that ends up being great uh what what's not great is that space is a vacuum and so obviously like a thermos flask is designed that way because of vacuum as an insulator and so the only form of heat dissipation you can have is infrared radiation and so everything in this world glows in infrared if you had a camera on your face your face would be glowing in infrared and the same is true in space and the the amount that it glows is proportional to the temperature differential between the temperature away from your faces or away from the satellite versus and it actually scales with the fourth power of the temperature so a very small increase in the temperature increases the heat dissipation by a huge amount and so um what that one of the critical things is we we need to run these radiators as hot as possible there's a few different ways you can do that either you can run the try and run the chips as hot as possible the problem with that is you the chips are you know have a shorter lifetime if you run them hot the other thing you can do is there's a few ways to artificially boost the temperature of the radiator so things like heat pipes heat pumps sorry which you can take for example 60 degree fluid from the chips and then you can turn that into 100 degree radiator temperature with heat pumps and so would you say the heat dissipation problem is like a solve problem for you all now you obviously have one GPU in space yeah what is it going to take to solve the problem for you know eventually hopefully give your watt scale data sometimes in space yeah how does it change as you scale yeah and so the first one actually has a very different thermal management system and then the next one coming up the first one we submerged the entire motherboard power systems GPU and everything else in this phase change material it's like a material that goes from solid to liquid as it as it heats up the we can't run that continuously though that was merely just to prove out that this works the second one is much closer to the end state which has got this enormous low cost and low mass deployable radiator so it has liquid we've got a custom heat sinks next to the GPUs runs past this fluid runs past the GPUs and and then out to this extremely large deployable radiator. From that one to the next one, just scaling it up, it actually is pretty simple. And so, yeah, we've tested this in thermal vacuum chambers and it works. We just need to now put it on all bit and make sure it actually works on all bit. And that's gonna happen later this year. - Awesome. And how much, I guess, religiously, you've won GPU up in space currently. Do you see yourselves launching, - Oh, you're five now. - Well, there's five Nvidia GPUs on that first one, the H100 is the one that gets the press. - I see, I see. How much, I guess, what is the launch capacity, so to speak, of what can you get up in a single payload and how big these, you know, do these individual data centers can get? - Yeah, so we're designing for the stock out three. The next one that we're launching is around eight kilowatts, so pretty small still. The one after that, which we're now designing is the stock out three. We can fit 50 of them per starship and they fit out the pes dispenser form factor that door that Starship has that little slit. - Yep. - So each one of those is about 200 kilowatts, about three tons. And so if you have 200 kilowatts per star cloud three satellite, and it's all for inference, essentially, that means you can fit 50 sets, about 10 megawatts per starship launch. And so once starship is flying at rate, you know, we're expecting to fly hundreds of these per month and so you're talking, you know, several gigawatts of new capacity per month, tens of gigawatts of new capacity per year. - So you mentioned it's all for inference. I was wondering about that because pre-training you want contiguous compute might be tough if you're sending everything up in a space. - Yeah, yeah. - Inference, you want low latency. There's some, you know, there's a speed of light component getting information to and from space. Is that a bottleneck at all? Or is that, is it low latency enough that it doesn't matter for inference? - It's, it's as low latency as stalling. So if you can do any inference workload through stalling, you know, if you were using chatchipity on your phone through stalling, for example, it would be exactly the same. So sub 50 millisecond latency, 20 on earth, and that means any, you know, like if you have a Zoom call, that could easily happen with 200 millisecond latency and you wouldn't notice the delay there. So basically any inference workload, you know, voice agents for customer service or back office business processing agents or video generation or chatchipity or anything else can be done with this constellation. - And then maybe a slightly different question but kind of on this vein. If you had a trillion dollars, just sit in the bank account and you had to use it to build the compute backbone for AGI. - Yeah. - How much of that trillion dollars is going into space? - 100%. - Okay. - All right. - Pay that picture for us. - I mean, I, we really all talking about by far the largest market opportunity ever. So we are talking about trillions of dollars per year and the capital has been going my best guess is that within five to 10 years, at least half of all new compute capacity is being deployed in space for the energy. So the problem with doing this buildout on Earth is that every additional cost, data sent to you add to the grid, like the marginal cost on every additional data center goes up every time you add one because we're using all the easy places to build energy projects. - Yeah. - In space, the marginal cost goes down for every additional unit because you're now, you're manufacturing it rate and your, you know, the more stars you see fly, the cheaper the cheaper it gets and all the rest of it. And so there comes a crossover point where it just makes it makes a zero sense to continue building things on Earth. So I think it will be like close to a trillion dollars per year of cap expand within 10 years being deployed in space. So by far the largest market opportunity ever. - Where and when do you think we all first crossover? When I say where and when, I mean like what Geos will become untenable and therefore you'll need to go up in a space. As soon as Starship is flying frequently, it will be cheaper to build data centers in space. So I might guess for, it looks like the first styling payloads will be either end of the year, early next year, styling B3 and then as I understand it will be 12 to 18 months after that, the first commercial payloads are going up and so that will be, yeah, on the order of mid to late 2028. And then once it's flying frequently, it becomes way cheaper. - Do you think that there's, you know, stuff that needs to be solved in terms of data transmission? Like do we need optical lasers sending data back and forth up there in order to kind of once we're operating data centers at scale in space? Now those all solve problem. - Machine network in space. That's so, yeah, it didn't used to be until two, three years ago, but you know, styling has basically solved that. And there's a bunch of other constellations coming online, Amazon Leo Kepler. And also, once we have a few of our satellites, we can do our own optical back all. So that, yeah, that problem would have been a big problem until quite recently, but it's not so. - And so each PES dispenser will be its own data sensor. Do you see them ever, you know, coming together? You had that picture, that concept photo in your first white paper. Do you see them being able to dock onto each other? - Eventually, yeah. It doesn't really make too much sense to do that initially because the only reason you would do that is if you want to train a large model in space. And to train a frontier model, you need, whatever the largest data center on Earth is, you need at least that in space. So right now that might be like 300 megawatts or something. You know, it's going to be a long time before we're going to be able to dock together 300 megawatt structure in space. And by that time, the biggest one on Earth will probably be three gigawatts. There's like a moving goal post. And the other thing to say about that is, training at the end state will be less than 1% of all AI workloads that are being done. And so it's just not a very good market to go after anyway. - Yeah. We showed it in the initial video 'cause we didn't want people to come back and say, "Yo, you can't do training in space." And we're like, "Well, you could if you wanted to." But it's probably not ideal for the initial. - It's more of a provocative photo. What about, you mentioned at the very beginning robots. Like, do you think we'll end up having maintenance robots in space to maintain these data centers? - Yeah, I don't think we'll necessarily be maintaining our small inference nodes. But certainly we'll have fleets of robots building large structures in space. I mean, they'll definitely be on the moon. Like if you're gonna build big manufacturing facilities on the moon, essentially something like Optimus will be doing that. Like, an Optimus robot doesn't require too much modification to work in space. You just essentially put it in a space suit and that takes care of thermal and radiation aspects of it. So, like a human space. - You don't see Optimus going to go maintain your. - Not really 'cause they're too small. Each runs only 200 kilowatts. So we just need to make sure that they're. If we docked it together, then yeah, you could have Optimus maintaining it. But you wouldn't fly up to us between each of ours and maybe you would, I don't know. That starts sound a bit sci-fi. - What's the useful way for them and how do you retire them? - So we're designing it to be the same as useful life of the chips, so five, six years. - Yep. - Potentially possibly longer actually in space 'cause our marginal cost of energy once we're launched is zero. So there's an argument we made that we can run them longer. But end of life for now is the same as styling, so deal bit. There is another possibility, which is putting them in some kind of graveyard or bit they call it, but for now it's just deal bit. - What goes into making a great. You guys have a bunch of mechanical engineers, satellite engineers. What goes actually into the engineering of solving this and what are the core competencies you look for? - Yeah. So as mentioned, the two biggest challenges are the thermal and the high radiation environment space. So for the thermos we've got, for example, the guy from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who designed all of the thermal systems for the Europa Clipper mission. That was NASA's largest, most expensive deep space mission ever. You also designed the thermos on the Firefly Lunar Lander and for three of the NASA payloads. And then another guy from Amazon Kuiper or Leo Constellation now who's lead thermal engineer there. And then a bunch of people from SpaceX for the thermal side of things. And then for the radiation and testing side of things, my co-founder, Adi, has previously launched a bunch of GPUs and did all this kind of particles that were actually testing. - Is that anything surprised you from the testing? - A few things, but it's, this is like our core IP. We're a bit totally about some of the things. - It's okay, it's a friendly idea. (laughing) - Do you very much seem like a SpaceX Elon Maxi based on some of the things you've said? What do you think of some of the alternative space launch companies? - I'm very hopeful and positive about them in general, but I mean, Elon, you guys have a massive space exhibition so you guys are presumably SpaceX Maxis too. And what a great investment from Sean, by the way, I think it was Sean. SpaceX, like I think Sean said, it's the best company ever. I do think SpaceX is the best company ever. I think they're like unbelievable what they're pulling off. So they're now, they're just so far ahead of everybody else. Like the other companies that could do, you need a reusable upper stage to be anywhere close to cost competitive. So you have stokespace, relatives, which is potentially going to look at it. I think that New Glenn is going to, the Blue Origin rocket, they haven't announced it, but they've started hiring for heat shield engineers and you wouldn't do that if you have a reusable upper stage. And then Rocket Lab, I don't think we're even trying. So even if they were to start now, you've got a five to 10 year long development cycle on a reusable upper stage. - And to the end, you guys partner with them. They are your launch partner. How does it feel to be building something where, you know, now Elon is also safe. that has intention is to put a lot of, a lot of data center capacity in space. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so it's basically so amazing partners like our company definitely wouldn't exist without the writer program. And in general, they're like extremely, you know, they work hard to foster the Holy Co system. I mean, they launch their own competitors, they launch Amazon Leo, the type of constellation, they launch one web, but should both direct competitors to Starlink and they open source their patents and things like that. So, yeah, we love working with with SpaceX. In terms of like the way that I think this plays out because you're right now, they're going extremely aggressively into building their own data centers. So, SpaceX will have a lower cost base than us because they own the launch. I think the way that we fit into this is kind of too far. Number one, SpaceX are mainly going to be serving their own workloads. So, Groc and Tesla and others, they may offer a third party cloud service, but as I understand, there's no intention to offer a box that people can put their own chips on, and then which is the core offering that we have, which is we essentially give people a box, and it has power calling and connectivity, and then they can put whatever chip architecture they want in there and sell to whichever customers they want. So, you can think of us more like Equinix was, SpaceX might be more like AWS or something like that. But so they will have a lower cost base than us, but we will have a lower cost base than all of the hyperscalers. So, the way I see this flying out, if it's true that on a sort of 5 to 10 year time frame, most new data center capacity has been deployed in space, what's going to happen is in three years, one Starship is flying frequently, all of the hyperscalers are going to realize this, and they're going to be like, oh, shit, like if we don't have access to space compute, we are screwed because we can't scale anywhere near as fast as those that do. And so, at that point, they have three options, I think. So, one is, you know, they can pay Elon for his base data center capacity, and for sure some of them will do that. That will be a good option. Some of them won't, you know, I think lots of, it seems like unlikely that OpenAI or Meta or Google or Microsoft would do that, or they can start building their own satellites. Again, some of them might do that. It seems unlikely. I mean, Google, for example, say they're doing what we're doing, what they're actually doing is they're paying planet labs to do a demo in 2027, which I mean, yeah, it seems like they're not moving particularly aggressively if they are doing that. Or they'll look around and they'll say, okay, who has the most, we need to move quickly on this, like who has the most advanced capability in the market. And at that point, we will be by far the most advanced in terms of what's deployed on all of it, and the engineering team, and all the IP that we have. So, I think at that point, we've become an interesting partner with those guys. And I do mean partner, not necessarily just acquisition target. You know, I think there is a relationship, a customer relationship where we provide the infrastructure energy, and they do the the cloud providing part of it. Yeah. And I have the business model question then. Why choose the equinex business model versus AWS or even Akamai? It's a good question. Yeah, we've been certainly looking at the cloud like being a cloud provider ourselves. In the initial early days, we will probably have to do something like that because nobody's going to trust us with their chips until we've proved it works for a few times. We would much rather be an infrastructure and energy play than a cloud provider. And the reason is our core, like the core IP of the company and the core skill that we're good at is building satellites that can dissipate heat and protect you from radiation. We don't necessarily want to rebuild, you know, AWS has spent 20 years building an incredible application layer on top of AWS. And customers don't necessarily want to not be able to use our functionality. And so, the other point of it is the most expensive partner of all of this is the chips, and we would rather have somebody else finance the chips and they can decide whatever chip architecture they want and all the rest of it. Maybe in much further down the line, it will make sense for us to have a cloud offering. But initially, I think there's a great business and it's also much higher margin, depending on which way you look at it, you can actually imagine. Okay, I have a question about real estate. How does real estate work in space? Because earlier you were saying what are the issues on Earth? There's running out of physical real estate to go build data centers on. And as space gets more crowded, how do you think it will work? Yeah, I mean, for now, it's essentially first-compulsive. And so, we've just followed for a constellation of 88,000. It would allow us to deploy about. What do you follow with? In the US, you follow the FCC. If you're going to interact with US constellations, you have to, if not, which actually means that we won't, you can pick any regulation in the world. And then they are under the ITU, the global governing body. It's weird that the FCC manages this, but I also think that's weird. I think it's a legacy from the days when the only things I'd like to do was communication and RF spectrum and things like that. Now they're going to, now they're doing much more. It's a bit of a legacy hangover the FCC's. So real estate today is first come first serve. How about 10 years now? 10 years from now, I expect it will be, certainly the most valuable slots will get filled up. And then it will probably be that whoever got them first will have the right to sell them. That's about to figure out how to be a, are overlord. All right, question about security. How does security work in space? So let's say a bunch of critical workloads are running on your satellites in somebody decides to attack them. Like how does that work? Yeah. I mean, we have a very good precedent for this, which is the stalling satellites. So like in Ukraine, for example, the military is using them. So if Russia, it's not the Russia hasn't tried or doesn't want to take out starting satellites, they definitely do want to. It's a lot easier to blow up a data center, even if you're Russia, to blow up a data center in Virginia than it is to blow up a data center moving at 27,000 kilometers an hour in low F all bit. And so if that were to happen, I mean, that would be considered an active war. Where the stalling satellites are flying right now, they're flying much lower than they used to. And so there's no sort of real risk of a casual type of like a chain effect destroying low F all bit. So yeah, I mean, the US, that is the primary function of space forces to then outbuilding a whole bunch of interceptors and things to deter space. Yeah, exactly. And I just have trouble visualizing how big space is. So this may be a gigantically dumb question. But as we get to this kind of Dyson sphere, like there's 100 gigawatts more than that in space. It gets to the point where there's just less light coming through the atmosphere because we have so much up there in Elio. That's a great question. Not the way that we've designed it, which is we're going to fly in this, what they call a Dawndusk Sun synchronous orbit. And it's actually good for us. It's good for astronomy. It's good for the fact that you don't block stuff out. So like, let's say this is the Earth, well, let's say like this is the Sun and this is the Earth. It's not like we're flying around like this. We fly over the poles. And so we never cast a shadow on the earth. And we also never in Earth's eclipse. So we never go behind the shadow of the earth either. It's been interesting. Yeah. So and it's great because it means we don't, we're only visible in the night sky at dawn or dusk. And so we don't then have problems with astronomy and all the rest of it. Yeah. Okay, there's been some as days in those and spaces become a almost a mimetic thing. Thanks to you. There's also been some fierce criticism of it. What do you think is the chief criticism, you know, what actually resonates to of the criticism and what would you say is untounded? Yeah. I think things like the thermal problem is like pretty easily solvable. Sometimes people put a cross equation out where they're still using the Falcon 9 launch cost. And you know, I say to people like, if you don't think the launch costs are going to going to come down, then we're like a terrible business. If you do, then, you know, we may be the biggest business ever. The one that not many people talk about, but there's actually probably the most significant is we need the chips not to have a higher failure rate in space than on Earth, because the chips are such an expensive part of what we're doing. Even if they have like a 10% higher failure rate, that would basically wipe out all of the savings from the from the energy. Speaking of which, what are the components of the ADL space data center? We sort of simplify and just say GPUs in space. GPUs, CPUs, memory, cooling, like what all has to go in the box? Yeah. It's much simpler than most satellites. Okay. Because most satellites, for example, the starting satellites, a huge portion of mass and the cost is these phased array antennas. We don't need anything like that. So it's pretty simple. It's solar panels, radiators, the box, like the bus, the chips and the chips, obviously, then come with memory, motherboard, power system. Although we need very small batteries, you can't send power directly from the solar panels to the chips. So you need some buffer in there, but we don't need to have 24 hours of battery storage, which you do for most data centers on Earth. But that's basically it. One reaction wheel because which is extremely unusual. Most satellites have at least three reaction wheels. They're very heavy because they need to turn the satellites as it spins up. It needs to turn the satellite. We only need one because the satellite's very long and you have this gravity, this like natural stabilization from the gravity gradient between the closest point to the Earth and the further the way it points the Earth. And so you only need to, you need a reaction wheel in this axis. And it's not going to move either this way or this way. And then two lises for communication and so you can start by the all of the stuff that goes into Lambe State Center. - Yeah, lots of stuff. I mean, chillers, calling towers, batteries, backup power, AC to DC converters, yeah, there's a whole bunch of things we can strip out. Like that's why, so like a huge component of the cost saving that most people don't talk about. Most people are talking about the fact, okay, let's say we can do three cents per kilowatt hour on the energy versus eight cents per kilowatt hour. That's one part of it. The second part of it is our infrastructure cost is instead of, you know, you're looking at 15 to $20 million per megawatt for new infrastructure for a daily center on Earth. So that's all of the things like chillers, calling towers, batteries, backup. For us, it's only less than $5 million per megawatt. And that's because it's just literally solar panels radiators. There's like nothing else really. - You said three cents per day, it turns, is that roughly where you think the power fast will coming in? - Our all in energy cost in the end state will be much lower than half a cent per kilowatt hour, including the launch cost. - Wow. - Yeah, the three cents is what we've signed for with one of the, with one of our, like, otherwise, yeah. - Okay, I see why this is gonna be one of the biggest businesses of all time. How are you thinking of sequencing out? Do your customers already, do you have contracts lined up? Like, what do you think will be the first workloads that you're running commercially in space? - Yeah, so we've sequenced it where, you know, there's a bit of uncertainty about the timeline and starship. And so the first few satellites are designed to provide edging cloud services for other spacecraft, particularly military and government satellites and earth observation satellites. And so, yeah, we'll be running workloads for various military customers. We already are actually on Star Cloud One. And you can basically keep the business running for as long as it takes to keep until starship is ready on those types of contracts. You know, they're on the order of a thousand times more dollars per hour for GPU time than a terrestrial contract would be, or if you're competing with terrestrial. So that's this one we're launching later this year. We're launching another one next year, a very similar Star Cloud 2 and Star Cloud 2.1. And we can basically just keep doing that. So you starship would delay two years or three years. We can just keep launching these, you know, edge nodes for other spacecraft. And then as starship ramps up, then we'll be launching the Star Cloud 3 satellite. And that's the first one, which is cost competitive with terrestrial data centers. For your space customers. Is there a reason they can't just run their workloads on land-based data centers and beam it up versus, yeah. Yeah, the main reason is we're hugely constrained on the amount of data you can downlink from space to earth. So for example, like SR satellites and better capture radar, there might be collecting five gigabytes of data a second. Then they have to wait for a ground station because they're only transmitting data through this very slow RF at the moment. When they're above a ground station, they might be getting one gigabit, a second data eight gigabit, not gigabyte. So much slower than, you know, the amount of data they're collecting. And so right now they just throw away 90% of the data they collect or they just always just not used. And so in future, if, you know, any satellite that can connect in with an optical terminal to the transport layer, like the SDA, space development agency has this transport layer, we'll be able to connect to us. They can ship enormous amounts of data to us through optical in space. And then we can run inference workloads on that in space. And that might be, for example, identifying a vessel in a normal, you know, they might send us 10 terabytes of data of just ocean. We can then identify the location of a vessel in that. At the moment, they don't have the processing power on board to do that. Interesting. So the initial workloads are likely to be data that is collected in space. Exactly. Processed in space. Yeah, that makes sense. OK, you spent a lot of time in space. Aliens. Great topic. I love this. I'm so excited. Are there relics? There almost certainly has been aliens in our galaxy. There's almost certainly aliens alive in the universe. Doesn't look like there's any intelligent life in our galaxy right now. Why do you say there almost certainly has been? If you're familiar with the Fermi paradox, like this question of why, yeah. Go ahead and explain it though. So Fermi paradox is the idea, it's we should see more life in our galaxy than we do. Or we should perhaps see life everywhere in our galaxy. If there had been life anywhere on this sort of 400 billion stars in our planet in our galaxy, each with 10 planets. So you talk about 4 trillion planets in our galaxy alone. And there's by the way, trillion trillion galaxies. But just in our galaxy, the Milky Way. And each one has been habitable for the last 10 billion years. So we've got 4 trillion planets, potentially habitable for the last 10 billion years. It would seem there's two possibilities. Either we are staggeringly rare. And that is a possibility. I'm believably rare. We're literally the first to reach this level of complexity in our galaxy's history. Or intelligent life is somewhat short-lived. Now my working hypothesis at the moment is the intelligent life is somewhat short-lived. And so, yeah, they call them the Fermi-Great filters. If we are extremely rare, the Fermi-Great filter is probably something like moving from single-cellular life to multi-cellular life. Like that is extremely hard for life to do, let's say. If the Fermi-Great filter is in front of us, which personally I believe it is, that means, let's say, once you hit superintelligence, it wouldn't take very long for a swarm of a million killer AI drones to make minutes meet of both themselves and the planet. And we're building swarms of a million AI killer drones. So, to me, it wouldn't be surprising if in the next few hundred to a thousand years, we do not pass the great filter. It's a little bit demerism. Like the other alternative is, we're literally the first. And I'm quite happy to continue living life as if we might be the first. I think we should send probes out to other stars. And I think we should expand and explore the galaxy and all the rest of it. Yeah, but in terms of, why do I think there's been others? Yeah, I just think it seems pretty unlikely if on four trillion planets for 10 billion years, we're literally the first to have reached this level of complexity. All of them would have probably seen, they would have all understood the Fermi-Products too. They would have all looked around and been like, wait, 'cause it only takes one million years or two million years to colonize the whole galaxy from the point we're at now. Even with the Voyager probe technology, you can get to Alpha Centauri in about 50,000 years, which is like the blink of an eye and galactic and evolutionary timescales. So we could send self-replicating probes to every star in the galaxy within about two million years. Like we don't see that anywhere. Any evidence of Dyson spheres or intelligence in our galaxy at all. And so, yeah, to me it's pretty likely there's been intelligence in our galaxy and it has not survived very long. What's your opinion? Yeah. Well, I don't know if I have an opinion on that, but I had a question for you as a follow-up, which is the, well, by the way, on that, the other thing that I think is an interesting theory is the, you know, ants by the side of the road and hypothesis, which is intelligent life is not short-lived. We're just irrelevant to it. And so, I like that too, but you would see Dyson spheres are all across our galaxy. Like it wouldn't be difficult. Like if you're an ant in the middle of Manhattan, you're not like, where are the humans? Like, you know, like the humans are pretty obvious. You know, yeah, yeah. The question of those, you mentioned, earlier you were talking about sticking up to this in a space suit and sending it to moon. And so, clearly, you've thought about kind of the steps to becoming an interplanetary species, you know, starting with the moon and Mars and whatever. How do you see that rolling out? I mean, the only thing I have to really go by is the plans that Elon has been putting out and it seems like that is by far the most likely, like the Artemis programs, honestly, it seemed like a bit of a disaster. But Elon's roadmap is unbelievably, like I think they can actually execute on that. So, yeah. And there's a reason to do it now. Like building mass drivers and shooting AI satellites from the moon is like an extremely strong economic incentive for getting to the moon. And then once we've done that, we'll go to Mars. So, yeah, in my lifetime, I think we'll have people on Mars. I think we'll have cities on the moon in my lifetime. - What do you think of the best business models in space? Other than data centers? - Definitely data centers is the best one. - Yeah. - There's a whole bunch. I think asteroid mining will be a huge business at some point. It might take a little while. Tourism, lunar hotels, low-ethyl-beauty hotels will be a big business. - Have you reserved one of the slides here? - From Skylar, G.O.U. I don't have 200 grand. I think that's how much it cost. (laughing) But no, I think it's probably quite a way off. And I think SpaceX is probably very well positioned to do that. And Elon Musk even said he was going to enable people to get to the moon. - Yeah. - And then what else? I think, yeah, manufacturing in space will be a big business. There's many more communications businesses that will be built. - Manufacturing, what in space? - Well, at the moment, you know, companies like Varadot are doing crystal structures, particularly for medicine and other things. But that's purely because they want to take advantage of the low-ethyl-beauty microgravity. I think over time, just because you can get access to more energy in space, it will be. You can do lots of things. If, for example, if you wanted to do refining of material from the lunar surface or from asteroids, you know, you can use the energy in space to do that. - Yeah. - Similar to the alien question. Do you think AI is going to help us understand the universe, like the universe conscious things like that? I hope so. Yeah, I mean AI will understand the universe a lot better than we do. Like it was coming with AI is something that's a trillion trillion times smaller than all of humanity combined. So it will have a much better grasp on the the reality of the universe than we do. And whether it's able to explain that to our dumb human brains is another question, but whether you're most excited for it to teach you. I would love to understand more about consciousness. I think that would be the most interesting thing to me, particularly the hard problem of consciousness and why seemingly robotic, you know, things like humans have quality or intentionality and have sensations and like the yeah, just consciousness in general would be very interesting to understand. What about you. Same answer. Oh yeah. Nice. How they're, what about you? On that one. How do I make? How do I maximize the multiple of money returns? While helping founders build legendary companies. No, you guys are using AI quite a lot internally, right? We are. So I did this when we went to fundraise. I was like, okay, I'm going to ask Gemini, which space data center startup it would invest in. If it was like, what did say? Star cloud. I guess. Good. Good. Good. Gemini. Maybe it's because it knows I run Star cloud. I don't know. It's sick of hunting. But I tried it with different windows and like if I was a VC, I would 100% need the same thing. Like maybe it's more sophisticated in that. We're doing we're doing everything. So for example, there's a lot of signal in what kind of infrastructure and tools that the models recommend you to use. And those going to be. So we're reminding that right now, as an example, there's just so many ways to be creative, I think. Yeah. And like our younger people are probably the most token hungry, token consumptive. And they're each kind of figuring out different creative ways to do things. Yeah, I posted on us like yesterday. I tried to be like slightly, this might sound like a weird way to phrase this, but I posted like monthly reminder that I'm not going to be happy until every engineer is spending $10,000 a month on tokens. Yeah. Yeah. And I know they're going, they're seeing they're going, that surely is not the right metric to track. But I just don't want them to be like, I want to I want to really drum it into them. Like this is literally what I expect. And I will be happy when you're spending 10 grand a month on tokens. So if like sometimes it comes to me and say, can we spend 300, can we spend 300 bucks a month on Grog for heavy? It's like, yes. In the end state, how much of GDP do you think will be spent on inference 99.9% Wow. So as in I think we're building a license fair and a license fair will be almost all of the physical economy. So yeah, you know, in sort of 500 to 1000 years 99.9% of the economy will be space compute and almost all of that will be inference. Unfortunately 1000 years is outside of our investment time frame. But I agree. In the end, I mean depends on your end state. Yeah. In the next few decades, it's going, if you've seen the percentage, the the charts of like percentage of electricity consumption that goes into compute or anything like this, that graph is not stuffing till it gets to 99.9%. Yeah. Awesome. This was so cool. I feel like thank you for joining us today. You live in the future and you brought that future to us. I think faster than we could have ever hoped. And so thank you for joining us today. This is an awesome conversation. Thank you so much. [Music]