Baker cites report that SpaceX plans to bring on eight gigawatts of compute in eighteen months, calling it incredible.
“A Substack writer will fund the AI. They think that SpaceX is gonna try and bring on eight gigawatts of compute over the next eighteen months.”
Baker argues TSMC remains a bottleneck even if orbital data centers solve power shortages.
“But even if we solve the shortage of Watts with orbital data centers, the TSM is still a bottleneck. And semi's and semiconductor manufacturing, you have a big advantage if you were ahead.”
Baker describes orbital compute as Blackwell-sized racks in space with 500-foot solar wings, not giant data centers.
“It's eight feet high. It's four feet deep, three feet wide. It's racks in space and SpaceX has showed you an illustration and it's a rack.”
Baker describes orbital compute as Blackwell-sized racks in space with 500-foot solar wings in sun-synchronous orbit.
“It has these solar wings that are probably 500 feet long on each side. You keep it in a sun synchronous orbit.”
Baker predicts orbital compute will solve power shortages in five to seven years but wafer shortages will persist longer.
“We're gonna address the watt shortages with orbital compute for sure in the next five to seven years. But the wafer shortage, I think, is going to persist for a long time.”
Baker predicts within seven years we may stop building terrestrial data centers, causing pain for infrastructure companies beforehand.
“But I can't imagine a day when in the next seven years, when we never build another terrestrial data center. Mhmm.”
Baker predicts terrestrial data center buildout will stop within seven years, causing pain for power and cooling companies.
“And the years leading up to that are gonna be very painful for a lot of the companies and the power cooling spaces, you know, these industrial names,”
Baker explains space offers six times more solar irradiance than Earth due to constant sunlight and intensity.
“You can have the satellite always kind of catching light. The sun is 30% more intense and this results in six times more irradiance”
Baker explains space data centers get six times more solar irradiance than earth-based facilities.
“The sun is 30% more intense and this results in six times more irradiance in outer space than on planet earth. So you're getting a lot of solar energy.”
Baker explains space offers six times more solar irradiance than Earth for data centers.
“The sun is 30% more intense and this results in six times more irradiance in outer space than on planet earth.”
Baker says only three US locations can provide gigawatt power to data centers at 10x normal cost.
“There's only basically three places in The United States today where you can get a gigawatt of power to a single data center that's reliable enough, I.”
Baker explains Intel's historical advantage of reaching semiconductor nodes first gave them 15-20% embedded advantage.
“Intel for the last, I don't know, fifty years, sixty years always got to the next node in semiconductor manufacturing first.”
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