JUST RECORDED: Elon Just Announced Something Way Bigger Than Tesla

We have a profoundly important announcement to make which is the most epic chip building exercise in history by far. This is really going to take things to the next level. So yeah, a level probably people aren't even contemplating right now. This is not in the — I would call this an sort of an out of context problem. It's not in their context. So we're going to adjust the context by a few orders of magnitude here.

Let's see. It's a joint effort. I'm pressing the button, but the button's not working. Oh, there we go. Okay.

Yeah, we aspire to be a galactic organ, a galactic civilization. So I think the future that everyone or most people I think would agree is the most exciting is one where we are out there among the stars where we are not forever confined to one planet that we become a multiplanet species like the best science fiction that you've ever read or Star Trek or Ian Banks or Asimov or Heinlein. And we want to make that real. Yeah. Not just fiction. Turn science fiction to science fact.

That's the glorious exciting future that I certainly look forward to. And it's worth considering like how would you rate civilizations? You know there was a physicist I think it was Russian in the '60s — Kardashev civilization — and he said if you're type one you're using most of the energy of your planet and we actually still have quite a ways to go to be properly a type one which still using a tiny fraction of the sun's energy that reaches our planet.

But the Earth only receives about half a billionth of the sun's energy. So the sun is truly enormous. The sun is 99.8% of all mass in the solar system. So sometimes people will ask me like what about other power sources of power on earth? What about fusion on earth? That is unfortunately very small because the sun is 99.8% of mass in the solar system and Jupiter is about 0.1% and earth is in the miscellaneous category. We are — I think as Carl Sagan I think might have said — earth is like a tiny dust mote in a vast darkness, very very small. The sun is enormous.

So the way to actually scale civilization is to scale power in space. This is necessarily true because we actually capture such a tiny amount of the sun's energy on Earth because we're just this tiny dust mote. Another way to think of it is roughly like electricity production on Earth of all of civilization is only about a trillionth of the sun's energy. Which means if you increase civilizational power output by a million, you would still only be a millionth of the sun's energy.

It's awe inspiring to consider that just how tiny we are in the grand scheme of things. And we often get caught up in these sort of squabbles on earth that are really very minor things when you consider the grandness of the universe. And so I think it is important actually to consider the grandness of the universe and what we can do that is much greater than what we've done before as opposed to worry about sort of small squabbles on earth type of thing. Not much point in that.

Yeah. We want to be a civilization that expands to the galaxy with spaceships that anyone can go anywhere they want at any time. That would be epic. And have a city on the moon, cities on Mars, populate the solar system, and send spaceships to other star systems. That sounds like the best possible future.

So to do that, we need to harness the power of the sun. And so a terafab — while it is enormous, a terawatt of compute per year is enormous by our sort of civilizational standards — it is still just one step along the way of being even a Kardashev 2. You still have a long way to go to even be a Kardashev 2 level civilization and you're not even registering as a Kardashev 3. So it's a very big thing by current human standards but still small in the grand scheme. And it's but very difficult for humans.

So to accomplish this very difficult goal really requires a combination of efforts of SpaceX, xAI and Tesla working together to create this epic terafab project. And you know Tesla and xAI and SpaceX have all done amazing things that people did not think would be done before. So there's a Giga Texas fab here. There's the Optimus robot that's being built. There's a global supercharging network. There's really quite a lot. And it wasn't that long ago when people thought electric cars wouldn't amount to anything. There were basically no electric cars for sale when Tesla started. And people said it was impossible. And now Tesla's making 2 million electric cars a year. Yeah.

And then xAI, although it's a new company now part of SpaceX, has also built the first gigawatt scale compute cluster, which in record time, Jensen Huang from Nvidia said he'd never seen anything built so fast in his life before. A great compliment from Nvidia. And then SpaceX, I guess you can read it for yourself or you already know. In the reusable rockets, people said that reusable rockets weren't possible and even if you did do them, they wouldn't be economically feasible. So we did them and then we made them economically feasible and now we've landed over 500 times and then we did the Falcon Heavy and now we're doing Starship and Starship is a critical piece of the puzzle because in order to scale compute and scale power you have to go to space which means that you need massive payload to space and Starship will enable that.

So this gives you just a sense of scale. We've got Optimus there. Optimus for scale. And Optimus is about 5'11. So it gives you a sense of the size of the Starship B3 rocket. The Starship V4 will be much longer. Actually the Starship V4 will make Starship B3 look short. So we'll expand with Starship B3 to 200 tons of payload to orbit from 100 tons with start with B3. And then you can see the — that's just a rough approximation of the AI the mini version of the AISAT. So that's roughly 100 kilowatts. It's showing the solar panels and the radiator to scale. For some reason there's been a bizarre debate about radiators in space. It's safe to say SpaceX knows how to do heat rejection in space with 10,000 satellites in orbit. Might know a thing or two. So you can see the radiator is actually quite small relative to the solar panels and we call that the mini sat since that's just 100 kilowatts. We expect future satellites to probably go to the megawatt range.

Yeah. So in order to get to the terawatt of compute per year, you need about 10 million tons to orbit per year and at 100 kilowatts per ton. We're confident this is feasible. Like no new physics or impossible things are required to get there. So I'm confident actually that SpaceX will get to 10 million tons to orbit per year and then we're building up to a terawatt of solar. So that solves the — will solve the solar problem the power generation. So then the key missing ingredient is therefore a terawatt of compute.

So this announcement is about solving the key missing ingredient. To give you a sense of what we're talking about, the current output of AI compute is roughly 20 gigawatt per year. This chart explains why we need to build the terafab because all of the rest of the output from Earth is about 2% of what we need. So if you add up all the fabs on Earth combined, they're only about 2% of what we need for the terawatt project or terafab project.

We certainly want our existing supply chain — to be clear, we're very grateful to our existing supply chain, to Samsung, TSMC, Micron, and others, and we would like them to expand as quickly as they can, and we will buy all of their chips. I have said these exact words to them, and there's a maximum rate at which they're comfortable expanding, but that rate is much less than we would like. And so we either build the terafab or we don't have the chips. And we need the chips. So we're going to build terafab.

And we're starting off with an advanced technology fab here in Austin. And I believe that Governor Abbott is in the audience. I'd like to thank Governor Abbott and the state of Texas for their support. So in the advanced technology fab we will have all of the equipment necessary to make a chip of any kind — logic, memory — and we will also have all of the equipment necessary to make the lithography masks. So in a single building we can create a lithography mask, make the chip, test the chip, make another mask, and have an incredibly fast recursive loop for improving the chip design. To the best of my knowledge this doesn't exist anywhere in the world — where you've got everything necessary to build logic, memory, and do packaging and test it and then do the masks, improve the masks, and just keep looping it.

We're not just going to do conventional compute in this. I think there's some very interesting new physics that is potentially — that actually I'm confident will work. It's just a question of when. So this is going to — we're really going to push the limit of physics in compute and we're going to try a bunch of wild and crazy things which you can do if you've got that fast iteration loop that I can't emphasize enough the importance of being able to make a chip, test it, and then change the design, do another one and have that in a single building. I think that our recursive improvement with that situation is probably an order of magnitude better than anything else in the world. Yeah.

So, broadly speaking, we expect to make two kinds of chips. One will be optimized for edge inference. So that'll be used primarily in Optimus and in the cars but especially in Optimus because I expect the robots — humanoid robots — to be made 10 to 100 times more than the volume of cars. Vehicle production on Earth is about 100 million vehicles a year and I expect humanoid robot production to be somewhere between a billion and 10 billion units a year. So it's a lot. So yeah, Tesla's going to make a very significant percentage of those is our goal.

And then we need a high power chip that is designed for space that takes into account the more difficult environment in space where you've got high power. You've got high energy ions, photons, you've got electron buildup. It's a hostile environment in space. So you want to design the chip — you want to optimize it for space and you also want to generally run it a little hotter than you would normally run a chip on Earth to minimize the radiator mass. So there just a bunch of constraints that would you design something differently in space than you would on the ground.