Future High Energy Demands - The Moon as a Data Center

Microsoft made a significant statement by entering a twenty-year agreement with Constellation Energy, which plans to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the site of the 1979 partial nuclear meltdown. Constellation Energy plans to invest $1.6 billion to refurbish and restart the reactor by 2028 with an estimated 835 MW of capacity. Microsoft entered the agreement to provide the energy demands for its AI data centers.

There is one problem with this: we cannot continue to scale energy usage like this without making the Earth inhospitable to organic life.

we will in just a few short decades be able to deliver payloads of a self-assembling farm of robots to mine the Moon, create chip fabs, build, and ultimately tile the Moon with GPUs. The Moon has a surface area of 14.6 million square miles, roughly the size of Asia. If we very conservatively tiled even half the Moon with GPUs and solar panels, the Moon could sustain a billion times the compute of the Colossus cluster and, with a few turns of Moore’s law driving chip technology forward, even a trillion times the compute.