Tesla will be one of the companies to make AGI and probably the first to make it in humanoid/atom-shaping form
For a century, telecom companies fought over the same densely populated cities.
They ignored 90% of the Earth’s surface because building towers was too expensive.
SpaceX just connected it all in 18 months.
SpaceX VP of Engineering Michael Nicolls just dropped a massive reality check on how fast the global grid is being rewritten.
Nicolls: “At the time that we started the direct-to-cell program, 20% of the land area in the US and 90% of the Earth’s surface was uncovered by terrestrial mobile connectivity.”
So SpaceX removed the ground from the equation entirely.
They moved the cell tower infrastructure into low-Earth orbit.
Nicolls: “The goal of Starlink Mobile is to connect to regular, unmodified cell phones everywhere in the world.”
No new hardware.
No specialized satellite phone.
The device already in your pocket.
Nicolls: “After 18 months, we fully deployed the first generation Starlink Mobile constellation consisting of 650 satellites. We are now operating across five continents and are the largest 4G coverage provider by geographic area in the world.”
18 months.
Five continents.
Largest 4G network on Earth.
Nicolls: “We’ve connected over 16 million unique users across the constellation and are connecting 10 million active users on a monthly basis. We expect that number to exceed 25 million by the end of 2026.”
Traditional carriers spent a century negotiating rights of way, trenching fiber, and erecting towers to connect a fraction of the world.
SpaceX connected it from orbit in a year and a half.
And here is what makes this a geopolitical paradigm shift.
Nicolls: “The Starlink Mobile constellation works by connecting over lasers to the broader Starlink constellation, which means we can connect to devices wherever they are in the world.”
The network routes through the vacuum of space.
No physical borders.
No terrestrial choke points.
No dead zones.
You cannot have true sovereignty if your connection to the digital world depends on a vulnerable tower someone else controls.
Starlink just made that dependency obsolete.
The old-world telecom grid didn’t lose market share.
It lost the map.
SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell just outlined the most ambitious infrastructure commitment in the history of the technology industry.
And it starts on the ground.
Shotwell: “xAI will commit to develop 1.2 gigawatts of power as our supercomputer’s primary power source, and that will be for every additional data center as well.”
Not drawing from the grid.
Rebuilding it.
Shotwell: “We’ll expand what is already the largest global megapack power installation in the world. The installation will provide enough backup power to the city of Memphis and more than sufficient energy to power the town of Southaven, Mississippi.”
This is not a software company optimizing an algorithm.
This is an industrial mobilization.
Shotwell: “We will build state-of-the-art water recycling plants that will protect approximately 4.7 billion gallons of water in the Memphis aquifer each year.”
Read that list again.
1.2 gigawatts of primary power.
The world’s largest megapack installation.
4.7 billion gallons of protected water annually.
Thousands of American workers on both sides of the Tennessee-Mississippi border.
This is what winning looks like before anyone writes a line of code.
And then Shotwell said what no tech company has ever said in a White House commitment.
Shotwell: “We commit to take these efforts into orbit. We are currently designing orbital data centers powered by the nuclear reactor in the sky.”
The nuclear reactor in the sky.
The sun.
Shotwell: “Launching supercomputers into space will mean even more energy on Earth, as all the power plants that we’re building now will be available to the communities instead of the data centres.”
You cannot achieve infinite compute on a planet with finite surface energy.
Space has no such constraint.
The endgame of the AI arms race was never just about building the smartest model.
It was about who could build the infrastructure to run it without limits.
Shotwell: “I’m confident that we will win the race with AI with China and succeed in delivering inexpensive, abundant electricity for the American people.”
Shotwell: “We are committed to deploying our AI technology to create a period of abundance where electricity becomes cheaper and people have access to the best goods and services humankind has ever seen.”
Every tech race before this one was won in software.
This one is being fought in gigawatts, megapacks, aquifers, and orbital infrastructure.
The Earth has a ceiling.
xAI just decided not to build under it.