Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) CEO Elon Musk backed Box Inc. (NYSE:BOX) CEO Aaron Levie’s warning that the coming wave of autonomous AI agents will demand enormous compute as companies prepare for personal assistants, enterprise agent swarms and always-on AI workloads.
Musk Backs Warning On Agent Compute
"People have no idea," Musk wrote in reply to Levie’s X post, which warned that "the compute needed for the stage of AI we’re about to enter is going to be insane."
Levie pointed to personal assistants, enterprise-defense swarms, code-security reviewers and background agents working around the clock, arguing that the buildout will require not only inference capacity but also computers, networking and file systems. Box has separately said enterprise AI could eventually involve agents outnumbering human workers by 100 or even 1,000 to one.
Wall Street is already modeling that shift. Morgan Stanley said in April that as AI moves "from generation to autonomous action," the bottleneck is shifting toward CPUs and memory. It estimated agentic AI could add $32.5 billion to $60 billion to a data-center CPU market projected to exceed $100 billion by 2030.
The International Energy Agency projects global data-center electricity consumption will more than double to about 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, with power use from accelerated servers, driven largely by AI, rising about 30% annually.
AI Infrastructure Demand Moves Beyond Earth
Musk’s response comes as the infrastructure race pushes beyond terrestrial data centers. He reposted Alphabet Inc.-owned (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google’s update on Project Suncatcher, which is testing whether Tensor Processing Units can operate in orbit.
Google said its first prototype, launched Oct. 1 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9, carries four TPUs and is gathering data on radiation, thermal conditions and spaceflight stress. Musk had previously backed the project with rocket emojis.
Space Rivals Scale AI Infrastructure Ambitions
SpaceX is pursuing its own orbital-compute ambitions through Starmind, with Musk saying that each planned spacecraft could have more than 250 kW of solar power, roughly 20% more than the International Space Station.
Musk also welcomed rival investment on Wednesday. After Jeff Bezos said he had personally invested $28 billion in Blue Origin and the company raised $10 billion from outside investors. Musk wrote, "Bravo! I’m glad @JeffBezos cares so much about space." The funding gives Blue Origin more capital to expand launch and space infrastructure.
Photo courtesy: Shutterstock
Login to comment