Today, Elon Musk publicly expressed his skepticism about nuclear fusion power generation on the social media platform X. He bluntly stated, "Building small nuclear fusion reactors on Earth is utterly stupid."
Musk pointed out that the sun itself is already a giant, free nuclear fusion reactor in the sky. The energy produced by the sun can meet the energy needs of the entire solar system, and building small nuclear fusion reactors would be an economic waste.
Similar views have existed for some time; Musk once predicted: " Solar energy... " Electricity will become the most important energy source in human civilization. In a podcast in 2023, he proposed that we have a giant nuclear fusion reactor in the sky, which only needs a 100-mile by 100-mile solar panel to meet the electricity needs of the entire United States.
In Musk's latest vision for space AI, he plans to deploy 100GW of solar-powered AI satellites annually, a scale equivalent to a quarter of the total electricity consumption in the United States .
He emphasized that as computing clusters grow, the combined demands for power supply and cooling will escalate to a point where ground-based infrastructure struggles to keep up. To achieve a continuous computing capacity of 200GW to 300GW per year, massive and expensive power plants would need to be built, as a typical nuclear power plant has a continuous generating capacity of approximately 1GW.
"In space, you can utilize continuous solar energy." You don't actually need a battery . "Because space is always sunny, and solar panels are actually cheaper because you don't need glass or a frame, and the cooling is just radiative cooling," he explained.
CITIC Securities It is pointed out that because no terrestrial power grid can be connected in the space environment, and the refueling cost of traditional fossil fuels is extremely high, photovoltaics has become almost the only efficient and long-term energy supply form used by space computing satellites. In addition, solar panels can be folded and deployed in orbit after launch, making it easy to expand the area according to computing power needs.
Just as Musk continued to champion solar energy, Tesla... Tesla's solar business is rebounding . In October, Tesla announced that it had begun producing its new self-developed solar panels at its Gigafactory in Buffalo, New York. The first batch of products is expected to be delivered in the first quarter of 2026. Last year, the company's solar installations plummeted, and it temporarily stopped releasing related data.
(Source: Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily)
