Elon Musk wants to harness solar energy for AI. The AI race has its sights on the stars, as companies push to migrate the world's networks to orbit. One of the movement's most vocal proponents is Elon Musk, whose firm SpaceX recently filed an application with the FCC to launch a data center with up to a million satellites into orbit. Dubbed Starmind, SpaceX's orbital data center project looks to be the company's most ambitious yet.

In the meantime, SpaceX will lean on NVIDIA to meet its expedient timeline. During the earnings call, Musk said that the Starmind AI1 satellite "is not some sort of far future distant thing," claiming that SpaceX will begin launching in 2027. AI1 satellites will use "NVIDIA Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs for data center class space compute," according to a SpaceX post on X. Each satellite is expected to hold roughly 72 NVIDIA chips and produce up to 175k W of computing power on average.

NVIDIA claims that the Vera Rubin NVL72 rackscale system delivers up to 25 times more AI compute than its older H100 GPU model. AI1's solar panel array will reportedly generate 210k W of power, while 1,700-square-foot liquid radiators will release heat into the vacuum of space.

Despite the executive's confidence, critics remain skeptical. Technical hurdles, cost constraints, scaling issues, and radiation threats threaten to push the constellation past next year's launch date.