Elon Musk: “I would be surprised if we brought on less than 13 gigawatts of compute by the end of next year. … I think we're going to face a shortage of super intelligence compute. And that shortage is going to remain for a long time.”

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“So I've been spending personally a lot of my time in Memphis, often four days a week, night and day, just getting the Memphis Supercompute cluster Colossus II online. We're tracking to be able to bring roughly 200,000 GB300s online per month for every month for the remainder of this year and continuing that pace next year. With next year being primarily Rubin, Vera Rubin compute. At this point, I would say -- I would say I'm fairly confident of being able to bring an incremental 10 gigawatts of compute online in 2027. That would be in addition to the roughly 3 gigawatts, maybe 2.5 to 3 gigawatts that we'll have online by the end of this year. So I put it this way. I would be surprised if we brought on less than 13 gigawatts of compute by the end of next year. [...] Our goal is to kind of split it 50-50, more or less, where half of the compute is used internally and half of it is rented to others. But that number could shift 60-40 one way or the other. It could -- it's going to be dynamic. And obviously, our approach is to rent at the -- effectively the spot market rate as opposed to sign these long-term deals. Our belief is that the value of compute per watt will increase over time, not decrease. And the reason for that, I think it should be obvious to people really is that as you improve the AI software, as the models get better and better, they're able to -- you get more useful intelligence per watt. And the value of that compute is proportionate to the useful intelligence per watt. And that's why you see things like even old computers like H100s renting for more than they rented when they were new. And I think that's likely to continue. I think we're going to face a shortage of super intelligence compute. And that shortage is going to remain for a long time. So I think the smart move is to do short-term contracts and to and essentially to make -- to place the bet on useful intelligence per watt increasing rapidly, which obviously has done. [...] So I don't think we're going to have a demand issue here. And like it's not impossible. I'm not saying this will happen. It's not impossible that we will have a six-month payback period for compute next year.”

— Elon Musk, SpaceX, 20.10.2026 ↗