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by Freedom2 15 days ago
Elon has mentioned before that he intends to place AI-powered factories in space that will manufacture and install new chips, while recycling the older ones. He says it's going to be fully self-sufficient.
3 comments

Haha sure.

He also said that cybertrucks would be deployed to Mars, it would be amphibious and bulletproof, people buying Teslas would make money turning them into to self driving taxis, and charged people for FSD in 2016.

If you believe anything he says, maybe you should get in on this spaceX stock deal!

That's the least practical solution of all (I say that as one of the few people in the world actually working on an orbital recycling project), especially if your technical advantage is launch, not inference chip manufacture. Apart from anything else, these giant satellites in LEO still need refuelling every five years, otherwise they'll just burn up in the atmosphere.

Replacing chips with newly launched chips on a refuelling cycle (and keeping all the heavy structural elements) is well within the boundaries of near term technology, but still involves enough mission and design-for-serviceability complexity to make it not obviously better than the 5 year recycle cadence Starlink and other modern constellations operate on.

Manufacturing newer, better chips in a microgravity environment using exactly the same material and plant technology as older chips is another thing entirely, particularly if you don't happen to own Nvidia et al's closely guarded trade secrets on how to make inference chips that are actually competitive and still aren't fully self sufficient even after the magical technology has been introduced because you need to top your massive satellites up with gas on a periodic basis....

Good one. Are they going to synthesize silica in orbit as well, from dark matter?