Transporting data centers to the moon is even more expensive than transporting them to an Earth orbit. It is very hard to compete with the Earth surface in terms of data center cost. It seems hard to believe to me that moon data centers could be viable.
But I wonder how serious he is about his stated plans are anyway. Perhaps he mainly needs more cash for xAI (which owns X which is loaded with expensive debt from the inflated Twitter acquisition, also paying for Grok GPUs/DRAM is expensive), and SpaceX can provide money from its substantial Starlink revenue.
A reason to think he might not be that serious about “securing the future of civilization” with a moon colony is just that escaping to the moon (or Mars) obviously doesn’t work for existential risk from an ASI.
Transporting data centers to the moon is even more expensive than transporting them to an Earth orbit. It is very hard to compete with the Earth surface in terms of data center cost. It seems hard to believe to me that moon data centers could be viable.
But I wonder how serious he is about his stated plans are anyway. Perhaps he mainly needs more cash for xAI (which owns X which is loaded with expensive debt from the inflated Twitter acquisition, also paying for Grok GPUs/DRAM is expensive), and SpaceX can provide money from its substantial Starlink revenue.
A reason to think he might not be that serious about “securing the future of civilization” with a moon colony is just that escaping to the moon (or Mars) obviously doesn’t work for existential risk from an ASI.