Elon pledges to give Nvidia a virtual monopoly over the stars

In space, no one can hear you scream when the LLMs hallucinate

Nvidia has reportedly secured an exclusive deal with SpaceX, committing to using only Nvidia GPUs for operational purposes. This collaboration is seen as unsurprising given Nvidia's dominance within the datacenter GPU market, which currently stands at about 85 percent. However, the partnership raises questions about the economic feasibility of space-based datacenters and whether Nvidia's financial resources will indeed bring this vision to fruition.

SpaceX has confirmed it will deploy Nvidia's Space-1, a specialized version of its upcoming Vera Rubin compute platform designed to operate above Earth’s atmosphere. This satellite will feature Nvidia’s Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs, housed within a massive 30-meter tall, 75-meter wide satellite capable of supporting a compute payload of 250 kW.

Despite the impressive specifications, the cost of launching the satellites remains prohibitive, with estimates suggesting the price could exceed $23 million for each satellite. For orbital datacenters to become cost-effective, SpaceX would need to significantly reduce launch costs to $10 per kilogram, a goal Elon Musk has stated but not achieved.

Even if the satellites fail to reach orbit, Musk's ambitious project could still offer terrestrial benefits, with SpaceX considering deploying Starmind AI1’s architecture in their ground-based datacenters for enhanced efficiency.

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