Elon Musk says the Star Mind computer SpaceX is building with Nvidia is far better than expected and will reach volume production next year
Old friends are the best friends. Jensen rocks. The Star Mind computer being co-engineered by SpaceX and Nvidia is far better than almost anyone expects and will reach volume production next year. Working with the incredibly talented Nvidia engineering team is pure joy!
Context
SpaceX is betting on orbital data centers to get around power limits on Earth, and Musk is now giving a production timeline for the Nvidia based computer at the heart of that plan.
Musk was quoting a clip from Jensen Huang's BG2 interview, posted by Fireside Alpha, in which Huang says the two companies' engineers are designing a new type of server for data centers in space. Musk's claims about performance and timing are his own and have not been shown publicly.
Deep dive
On October 15, Elon Musk posted: Old friends are the best friends. Jensen rocks. He added that the Star Mind computer being engineered jointly by SpaceX and Nvidia is far better than almost anyone expects and will reach volume production next year, and called working with Nvidia's engineering team pure joy.
He was quoting a clip from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's interview on the BG2 podcast, shared by the account Fireside Alpha. In it Huang says he loves working with Musk, that Musk uses Nvidia technology to train and deploy his own AI models and also rents it out, and that one new market the two will explore together is putting data centers in space. Huang says their engineering teams are working closely to create a new type of server and architecture that might be super good in space and on Earth.
SpaceX's Starmind page describes an orbital satellite with onboard AI compute of up to 250 kW peak, powered by solar energy, cooled by radiating heat into space and linked to Starlink by lasers. It says a Gigasat factory in Bastrop, Texas is planned to build thousands of these satellites starting as soon as late 2027.
Musk did not say what volume production means in numbers, and none of the hardware has flown yet.
What to expect next
Watch for a first launch of a Starmind prototype and any published specs for the space version of Nvidia's Vera Rubin system.
Also watch whether Musk's volume production target for next year holds, whether SpaceX deploys the same design in ground data centers as Huang suggested, and whether regulators approve the large satellite constellation the plan depends on. Any independent look at the hardware would be the first outside check on Musk's claim.