Elon Musk backs Larry Page prediction that most computing could move to space, Digi Mart USA News: SpaceX CEO Elon Musk endorsed a forecast attributed to Alphabet Inc. Google co-founder Larry Page that nearly all future computing capacity could eventually operate in space.
Musk wrote on X on Sunday, “Larry Page has made many accurate predictions and this is one of them.”
His post accompanied a clip from the November 4 episode of the Invest Like the Best podcast, hosted by Patrick O’Shaughnessy and featuring Martin Casado. O’Shaughnessy said he had “heard this story recently” about someone asking Page how much computing would eventually be located in orbit.
Page’s reported answer was “five nines,” or 99.999%.
Casado suggested that this could be driven by regulatory obstacles, including hundreds of proposed U.S. bills limiting new data center construction.
The prediction comes as companies examine whether space could support AI hardware, potentially avoiding some terrestrial infrastructure constraints. In September, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that Project Suncatcher will test the company’s AI chips, Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), in space for the first time.
The prototype satellite will launch aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission in collaboration with Planet Labs, evaluating whether the chips can withstand and operate in space. Musk backed the initiative, responding to Pichai’s announcement with two rocket emojis.
One month later, the company announced that it completed initial commissioning tests, successfully powering up its host and TPU trays and running early machine learning workloads. It then achieved a milestone by generating the first AI response from a data center-class TPU in orbit, using its onboard Gemma 4 model to create a haiku about space.
Earlier this month, Musk said cooling AI data centers in space could be easier than on Earth, citing aluminum radiators as a potential solution. Musk estimated that radiators facing away from the Sun could dissipate about 1,300 watts of heat per square meter by radiating heat toward the near-absolute-zero temperatures of deep space.
SemiAnalysis said SpaceX is targeting 13 gigawatts (GW) of AI computing capacity within 18 months, potentially making it the world’s largest data center operator. The research firm called it the biggest data center infrastructure buildout by a single company over such a short period, noting that SpaceX aims to achieve in 1.5 years what took Google nearly three decades (1999–2026) to build.
This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
