Musk tells Huang: 5 GW equals 1% of US GDP, SpaceX building 10 GW for orbital compute
tctjr · x · 2026-09-30
In a full interview with Jensen Huang, Gavin Baker, and Tom Brown, Elon Musk argued power is the bottleneck of the superintelligence race: the US grid is 500 GW, and each 5 GW added is worth roughly 1% of GDP ($300B, or $60B per GW, with Huang estimating $40–50B of output per GW). Musk said China has 3x US electricity, SpaceX will build 10 GW (25% of all new US power), and SpaceX + Tesla are targeting 200 GW/year of solar capacity toward orbital compute. Huang stressed that superintelligence has reinvented the whole compute stack with energy first, and high launch costs are worth paying.
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