1 day ago · Tech · 0 comments

Weird glitch in the news matrix today. Google the phrase "100 terawatts of processing power" on April 30, 2026 and you'll find articles on Elon Musk's new SpaceX pay package. One phrase caught my eye: [Elon Musk's pay package] has additional incentives of 60.4 million in restricted shares if SpaceX… operates space-based data centers with at least 100 terawatts of processing power. Gizmodo (original source is Reuters, but it's paywalled) Terawatt is not a unit of processing power. It's a unit of power, as in "how fast energy is being used." The entire world currently consumes electricity at a rate of 3.5 terawatts. That's one hungry space computer. Electricity consumption was 28,000 terawatt-hours in 2023. Extrapolating 2026 consumption as 31,000 terawatt-hours and dividing by (365.25 × 24) results in 3.536 terawatts on average. Maybe they meant "teraflops," but 100 teraflops of processing power is roughly one NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card. "They" being either the SpaceX board…

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