Elon Musk, talking at WEF in Davos, has painted a picture of an AI, space and solar future, combining the three stands together in an optimistic view of the future.

Starting with AI, Musk sees a major limiting factor being electricity supply, noting that: “we're seeing the rate of AI chip production increase exponentially, but the rate of electricity being brought online is four per cent a year max. It's clear that we're very soon, maybe even later this year, we'll be producing more chips than we can turn on.”

Has a Musk an answer? Of course he has: “One of the things we'll be doing with SpaceX within a few years is launching solar powered AI satellites, because the space is really the source of immense power. And then you don't need to take up any room on earth. There's so much room in space and you can scale to enormous. I mean, you can, you can scale to. I think ultimately hundreds, hundreds of terawatts a year.” Adding: “Lowest cost place to put AI is space.”

If not, then Musk estimates that to create the required solar power on earth would need a farm 100 miles by 100 miles to power the entire US. Or as he puts it, “basically a small corner of Utah, Nevada, Nevada, New Mexico, a very small percentage of the area of of the US to generate all of the electricity that the US uses. And the same is true for Europe, you could take a small you could take a relatively unpopulated areas of, say, Spain and Sicily and generate all of the electricity power that you'll need”.

There would clearly need to be battery storage too, on an immense scale, and supplemented with other clean generation.

But back to AI in space, Musk sees the key breakthrough as full reusability. If this could be done with and is being tested with full reusability on the Starship, the cost of access to space would drop, Musk says, by a factor of 100.

This makes putting large satellites into space economical, because it's sunny, and also cold (three Kelvin) for effective cooling, and 30 per cent more powerful in space because there is no atmospheric attenuation of the power, the net effect is solar is five times more effective in space.

Musk ended the session with a joke: when asked if he wanted to die on Mars, he quipped: “I've been asked a few times, like, do I want to, you know, die on Mars? And I'm like, yes, but just not on impact.”

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