SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said SpaceX’s artificial intelligence competitors are clamoring to rent computing power from the artificial intelligence and rocket company.
“We’ve also been relentlessly courted, frankly, by every hyperscaler and dozens of smaller companies asking to rent more of our computers,” Musk said during SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call on Tuesday.
Musk said SpaceX could lease the company’s computers multiple times “if we’re okay with everybody.”
However, SpaceX is reserving much of that capacity for its own AI ambitions, including expanding its AI chatbot Grok and Cursor, a coding startup it recently acquired.
Musk said SpaceX is looking to use about half of its computing resources internally and lease the other half to third parties. That balance may change from month to month, he said.
“It’s going to be dynamic,” Musk said. “Obviously our approach is to lease at spot market rates rather than sign these long-term agreements.”
Musk said the company expects that as artificial intelligence models improve, the value of computing will increase and ultimately produce “more useful intelligence per watt.”
“The value of computing is directly proportional to the useful intelligence per watt,” Musk said, adding that rental prices for older Nvidia H100 chips have climbed compared to newer chips.
“I think this is probably going to continue,” Musk said. “I think we’re going to have a shortage of superintelligent computing. And it’s going to be a shortage for a long time.”
Musk likened the situation to Monty Python’s famous cheese shop sketch, in which a customer repeatedly asks for a different cheese, only to find it’s not available.
“We’ve actually tried to offload some of the inference computation to other cloud providers so that we can use more computation for training,” the CEO said. “We got a sketch of the cheese shop.”