Trump-Xi Summit, Inflation Bad, Space Data Centers, Malaysian Fugitive

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You're watching TBPN. Today is Wednesday, May 13th, 2026. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. A bunch of news going on today. Huge show. Max Levchin's coming on the show. Delian's coming in person from Varda. Recursive is coming out of stealth. Brandon Hill from Boreas. Nate Tew from Trueshort. Very excited to talk about vertical video. The trough — the trough is cooking. Some of the trough is economy. Juben Mzadagon from Roadrunner and Roman Churn from Nebius. Absolutely destroying earnings. Very excited to talk to the co-founder and chief business officer over at Nebius.

But the big news this week, and I'm sure what everyone will be focused on, is of course on the cover of the Wall Street Journal: the Trump-Xi summit that's happening in Beijing. Trump and Xi Jinping, winner-take-all summit. They're duking it out. And they both brought a big crew with them, a team. Yeah, Trump brought geopolitics, a couple political people that we won't even care about, but the business leaders are what is particularly interesting. So we got Elon Musk from Tesla, Tim Cook from Apple, Jensen from Nvidia, Kelly Ortberg from Boeing — a little flex there because Boeing has been able to maintain the lead in manufacturing large planes for a very long time. DJI has not been able to scale up and make a 747. What's going on over there? David Solomon from Goldman Sachs, Steven Schwarzman from Blackstone, Larry Fink from BlackRock, Jane Fraser from Citi, and Dina Powell McCormack from Meta. So we should read through the stakes of the Trump-Xi summit in the Wall Street Journal. Let's get into the more important stuff, which is...

Do you think Jensen was always coming on the trip? Right. There's been some speculation he got on the plane in Alaska.

Oh yeah.

Was that just the most convenient place for him to get on, or was he a late addition?

I don't know. Why would he have been a late addition? I don't know. It seems like...

Well, because there was reporting earlier this week — he runs the largest company in America.

I know, but there had been statements made from what I saw that he wasn't going. I don't know.

Yes. Well, so Trump had a Truth Social post that said CNBC incorrectly reported that the great Jensen Huang of Nvidia was not invited.

But then he corrected it. He said he didn't invite him personally.

I don't know. These schedules move around. But it's got to be really, really difficult if you're the leader of the biggest company in the world to move things around and commit to this. I don't know.

I know. But what's more important for Jensen and his objectives?

No, of course it's of critical importance. But at the same time, there might have just been other moving pieces of like, okay, when can he go, where will he arrive from, where will he get picked up from? I don't know. These things always shift. I don't have a good thesis. I mean, other than the fact that that is the company that has maybe the most tension between the trade deals with China. Like, Apple obviously does a ton of business in China but has been much less of a focus in the chip sanctions, and so having Jensen there is a little bit more of a discussion point. What do you think?

I mean, I think on China, like the Nvidia stuff seems pretty fine now. But yeah, but Meta I think has some conflict, right? Because I mean, Manis — yeah, maybe it's not that big of an acquisition on market cap wise, but...

They're blocking it.

A lot of these things, you know, we say in the context of Silicon Valley, it's like a $2 billion deal or a company that's doing $40 billion in revenue. And then you get over there and the stakes are like, you know, a trillion-dollar oil market or like all the rare earths in the world, and it's your geopolitical conflict, which is obviously a much bigger deal. And so, I don't know, we can speculate more. There might be more reporting that comes out about Jensen's goals there, what actually happened, how he found his way onto Air Force One. But that was confirmed by Elon Musk, right? You said that Elon, Jensen, and Trump were all on Air Force One together flying over. I certainly wouldn't want to get there — I would want to arrive on the cool plane. Can we play the video of the arrival? Trump arrives in Beijing with Elon Musk and Jensen in tow. I guess the rest of the business leaders came separately. But here is their arrival with — are those cheerleaders or something? I don't know what...

They seem to be waving — oh, flags. They're waving flags.

That makes sense. Well, there they go walking down the red carpet. Air Force One is truly stately. It's so disappointing that the economics of the airline industry didn't just get bigger and bigger. And so you find yourself very rarely on 747s unless you're flying across the world, because they do have such a presence and they're spacious inside. But we have been cramped down into the 737s for pretty much everything.

Where they give a proper tour of Air Force One, or is it kind of locked down?

I think they've done tours. I mean, there are several Air Force Ones, I believe, that are on display at presidential libraries, and so you can go and tour them. There might be one at the Smithsonian. I'm not exactly sure, but I'm pretty sure you can go walk around old ones. I wouldn't be surprised if they keep the current spec somewhat secretive. There we go. This is very grainy footage. It looks like — oh, maybe it's just the middle.

Kind of reminds me of Dune.

Dune, my Arrakis. That's Taiwan, though. Anyway, let's go through Jensen's pack list. He was having trouble thinking of what he was going to bring. Of course, he landed on just a ton of leather jackets.

And the sneakers, I feel like, are pretty iconic.

Yeah, like the uniform is really starting to compound where it used to just be the jacket. Soon we will know the exact brand and specs of the pants as well as the shoes, and the whole Jensen uniform will be out in full force.

Yeah, the clothing industry doesn't want you to know this, but wearing — just getting a few pieces of clothes that you like and then wearing them until they fall apart is incredibly underrated. Not saying that's what Jensen's doing, but...

It's pretty funny. I tend to wear almost the exact same thing every day. And so sometimes people on the team will come in and be like, 'Oh, we're matching today.' Like, every day you dress like this, you will match with me.

Yeah, that's right. That's right.

There's obviously a personal brand benefit to adopting a uniform. We've seen it with Jensen, Steve Jobs with the black turtleneck, Palmer Luckey with the Hawaiian shirt. Big news from Anduril today. New round, Series — are they running out of letters? Series H. Series H, $51, $61 billion, something like that. Fantastic progress. But you adopt the uniform, you become more iconic, you become more recognizable outside of your face, and that builds your personal brand, your lore, and it helps you sort of differentiate and stand out, right? The flip side, the thing you got to watch out for, is that if you are always dressed exactly the same and you never switch your wardrobe, clips of you saying something a decade ago can go viral. And if you're aging gracefully, it will look like you said them just yesterday. And that can be a big problem if, say, you're an AI CEO who a decade ago was reading some sci-fi and thinking like, 'Man, there's something to this Terminator thing.' And then maybe in the past decade you've done a lot of work, you've investigated the systems, you have a more informed position and opinion. Well, the old video of you still looks like you today. And so there might be something to leveling up the wardrobe and changing the wardrobe over time that actually creates more distance between — 'Oh, well, clearly that was...'

So this is an indirect way of saying you want Jensen to be in a leather sort of, you know, sort of trench coat eventually, like flowing robes.

Well, the easiest thing to do is go bald. That's what Jeff Bezos did. If he was saying some crazy stuff back when he was building Amazon in the '90s and he's changed his opinion, it will be very evident from new clips that, 'Oh, that's an old one,' because his older look is very iconic. Now his new look, he looks transformed. He looks very different.

I don't think Jensen has to go bald, but he can do the Bezos playbook, which is just get really jacked.

Get really jacked.

So as he gets more jacked, you'll just see — oh yeah, there's — I mean, he's looking like 320 lean right there.

There you go.

Like, that must be pretty basic. 320.

Jensen at 320 would be electric. Well, he's...

We have a video of the Air Force One Golden Palace. Okay, pull it up.

What is the Golden Palace?

That's the...

Is that what they call the interior these days?

The Air Force One that was gifted by Qatar.

Okay. And that one is never going to be in use, but going to go straight to the library, I think. Is that the idea, or is it going to get flown around? Well, let's watch the...

Presumably, it's going to be used.

Golden Palace. Really particular aesthetics here. It looks like a normal 747 on the outside.

Looks like a yacht.

I feel like, isn't there a big swing in fuel efficiency based on the color of the plane? If you paint your plane black because you think it looks cool, it will attract more heat and you will burn a lot more fuel. And so most companies go with white. Spirit Airlines went yellow. I don't know if that had anything to do with their downfall, but you would think — is there a chance, is there some weird economic logic where if you paint it gold, the gold will reflect the sunlight and increase...

Unfortunately, the exterior is not...

So you should wrap your plane in like a mirror, like...

Yeah, maybe. But yeah, I don't know if that actually — that would probably reflect the most, right? Mirrored plane.

There are some silver bombers and jets that are in service across the United States Air Force. I can't call upon it right now.

This really is a sky yacht.

Chessboard. You think anybody's played chess on there?

4D chess.

Yeah, the whole plane is actually used for 4D chess, John.

4D chess. Chess is already 3D by default. It's a 2D playing board, but time is the third dimension because the turn that you're on is a dimension as well.

This goes deeper than I thought.

So 4D chess is merely a 3D representation of 2D chess that's played over time. That is the fourth dimension.

Anyway, AI is being put to good use visualizing Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Tim Cook having a beer and I guess a cigarette as well in China somewhere. And then look who pulled up. If you scroll down, Jensen coming in from the back. Looking pretty good. Looking pretty good. Maybe not 320 lean, but he's certainly up there. He's scrolling up. And people are really having fun with this. It turned into a little chain letter. Anyway, let's go through the Wall Street Journal's report and what the editorial board had to say about the stakes of this summit. What's actually at stake? So, 'The United States wants stability, but Chinese communist leader has larger ambitions,' says the Wall Street Journal's editorial board. President Trump visits Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Thursday, and the pre-meeting US spin is a search for stability, in quotes. It's a nice idea as long as Mr. Trump doesn't think personal rapport can overcome Mr. Xi Jinping's anti-American purposes, says the Wall Street Journal. The agenda ranges from trade to technology to Iran. On trade, the best outcome may be ratifying the status quo: a truce on tariffs with a promise from Beijing not to hold the world's rare earth supply hostage again. The markets, business leaders, no one wants chaos. Everyone can sort of work around a tariff plan if it's going to...

for a long time, for Trump to be coming in being like, 'Look guys, all I'm asking for is a little stability here.'

Yes.

I just want stability. I want calmness. I don't want any conflict.

Yes. Didn't he famously call himself a stable genius? That stability has been part of his brand for a long time.

At least the one that he projects. Mr. Xi Jinping, on the other hand, China's weak economy is an incentive for him to cooperate, and he'll hope to play Mr. Trump with promises of buying more farm goods. We talked about this previously, more aircraft and other things. So that's maybe why Boeing is there. Although it doesn't look like there's representation from an agricultural leader, although I can't name one off the top of my head, but maybe they should be represented. But Mr. Jinping has made that promise before, and US farmers have never regained their lost market share in China. Rare earths ransom offer: the rare earths ransom offer may be more US advanced chip exports to China. Jinping views artificial intelligence as a decisive theater in Beijing's competition with the United States, and he is trailing, though not by much, maybe six months by most people's estimates. The administration wants to talk with Beijing about AI guardrails, and by all means keep the phone lines open. But don't expect much from AI arms control. And the best deterrent is US dominance on models and computing power. Beijing will be happy to make pronouncements about responsible stewardship and then pursue its own interests with little regard for norms or laws. Beijing is engaging in, quote, 'industrial-scale theft' of American AI models, the Trump administration warned this year. And don't forget the Justice Department's indictment this year of a technology executive and associates allegedly running a sophisticated operation to divert high-end chips to China. That was...

Super Micro.

Super Micro. Yeah, they were doing the heater. What was it? The hair dryer.

Hair dryer.

Yeah, they were putting the fake shipping labels on there.

Fake shipping labels. Yeah. Um, noticeably absent from this trip are the key leaders of the top AI labs. Um, I mean Elon Musk is there. And Jensen is there, obviously deeply involved in AI, as are many of the other folks. Uh, Dina Pal McCormack at Meta, but you don't have Demis from Google. You don't have Sundar from Google DeepMind. Uh, you don't have Dario from Anthropic or Sam Altman from OpenAI. And each one of those leaders has their own complicated relationships with the federal government and the Trump administration. Uh, so it's not shocking that they aren't there, but uh, it does feel like there's a little bit of a disconnect between the conversation that's happening in Silicon Valley and the conversation that's happening on the global geopolitical stage at the highest levels. And so, uh, if you were looking for answers to some of the biggest questions posed about how superintelligence will play out on the global stage, the AI 2027 scenario, the China wakes up scenario, uh, you're going to have to keep waiting because uh, that's not really what this is about. It's about maybe a little bit of semiconductor supply chain details and export restrictions, but not answering the big questions about what a US-China relationship looks like in a post-AGI world, a post-ASI world, a post, you know, a fast takeoff scenario.

OTP says, 'Why is Meta there at all?' Good question. All Meta Platform products have been banned for quite a long time. I don't think they have this man. I would be shocked if there's any time between Xi and Trump that gets dedicated to Manus because like $2 billion is really a rounding error when you look at all of these other issues.

Um, but uh...

But it is a big question for both economies. Not only can American companies acquire Chinese companies that have relocated to Singapore and have sort of moved out, like how strict will China be around maintaining talent and restricting exports of whole companies and technologies? Uh, there even like a single sentence on it from this talk will clearly resound throughout the industry. Um, and so uh, the Venus flytrap that Jinping is setting for Mr. Trump is on Taiwan. Jinping wants veto power over arms sales from the United States to Taiwan, and he is pressing for the United States to formally oppose Taiwanese independence as opposed to the current posture of not supporting it. Uh, Jinping will argue the tweak is of no great consequence to Americans and stroke Mr. Trump's ego that he can bring peace to one more troubled region. Yet that change would disrupt decades of US policy that, for all its delicate diplomatic wording, has held the peace. Taiwan is not the aggressor in the Taiwan Strait, a Jinping fiction that opposing independence would indulge. Mr. Trump may not care about Taiwan's freedom or its example that a prosperous Chinese democracy is possible. Uh, but the president doesn't want a crisis on his watch, which would be an economic and geopolitical catastrophe. That's 100% accurate.

He would never want an economic geopolitical catastrophe.

No.

On his watch.

Uh, Jinping will be looking to see if Mr. Trump suggests he won't defend Taiwan in the clutch. Uh, Trump's diplomacy is above all personal, and no one can predict what he'll do in the room. Japan and others in the region are watching with anxiety, a reminder that US support for Taipei is an interest that informs America's alliances around the world. One mistake would be not stopping in Tokyo in advance of Beijing as a signal of solidarity with Japan. Uh, Trump has said he'll bring up the case of political prisoner Jimmy Lai. Uh, but Jinping won't move to release the 78-year-old publisher who was convicted of bogus charges in Hong Kong unless he believes Trump's request is more than a token gesture. Uh, the US wants China's help on Iran, and it would be an improvement if China at least stopped actively helping the enemy. Uh, retired Navy Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery suggested last week that Mr. Trump should ask Jinping directly if he's helping Iran with intelligence. And the Wall Street Journal goes on to say the larger context for the summit is that the CCP continues to be the main financier and industrial base for the world's bad actors from Russia to Iran to North Korea. The first Trump administration understood China as a strategic adversary, military, economic, and ideological. The second Trump admin is searching for détente, and Mr. Trump is the chief dove. Uh, this has some merit if America spends the interlude diversifying its rare earth supply chain and passing a $1.5 trillion defense budget to rearm, says the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Um, anyway...

Yeah, and a lot of people are speculating that uh, there's already been significant deals that have been made and that this whole thing is ceremonial because if you bring, if you make this, you know, huge trip and you bring all these leaders of industry and then you don't come away with some significant progress, like it just feels like an even bigger...

Um, and uh, and it's good to see. Every time we talk to an expert on China like Bill or Jordan Schneider, it's always shocking like how little direct comms there actually is between these groups. And so um, the more the better. Mhm. Well, uh, in somewhat related news, uh, Anthropic has granted Mythos access to three major Japanese banks. Uh, Japan's three mega banks are set to gain access to Claude Mythos, the powerful artificial intelligence model developed by US startup Anthropic, as soon as the end of May. Uh, the banks MUFG Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp, and Mizuho Bank were likely informed of the move by the US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in a meeting in Japan on Tuesday. This will mark the first time that a company from the East Asian nation has been granted access to Mythos. The AI model, which can discover and exploit software security flaws far faster than earlier tech, had been restricted to just 50 or so corporates and organizations worldwide, including US firms, US banks, and UK government organizations. So, this isn't the first international expansion since the UK did have access, but now Japan does. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi had instructed cabinet members to ramp up efforts to find cybersecurity weaknesses in Japan's infrastructure and minimize risks posed by cutting-edge AI models like Mythos. Access to Mythos was likely mentioned in her meeting with Bessent on Tuesday. And so, uh, Chris Maguire says, 'Tonight, the Secretary of the Treasury is personally vetting and approving each company that gets access to the most advanced US AI model because the risks of the model being misused to hurt US national security are so high. Also tonight, Jensen Huang is flying on Air Force One with President Trump to Beijing to sell China the AI chips it will use to develop its own Mythos-level AI model as soon as possible. The administration's AI policy remains inconsistent, incoherent. It is impossible to justify these two approaches simultaneously.' And um, yeah, I'm still sympathetic to the export control take. At the same time, I feel like there's a larger negotiation that's going on, so I can sort of see both sides. But uh, the interesting question that I've been noodling on that I haven't fully gotten to the bottom of is uh, you know, Dario has said that uh, you know, the open-source community, China, is maybe six months behind Mythos. Uh, and that seems to fall in line with the progress that we're seeing from all the American labs. And so the interesting question is what would the Mythos moment look like in China? Because in America there was a showdown with the Department of War and Dario going back and forth and Amodei, Michael, and there was threat of a supply chain designation which it doesn't feel like ever really went anywhere uh, because the business is still cooking and it's available on all the hyperscaler clouds and uh, the model's being granted to Japan. And so uh, it feels like the administration has backed off of that. Um, but it was a really tense moment and it did call into question all these debates around what rules and what authority should rest with the private sector versus the government. Uh, and America handled it in sort of a democratic way, loosely uh, sort of evaluating the technology, uh, having the option to sort of nationalize, and there's this bigger discussion around that. Um, but in China, we've seen many times where tech companies have gotten really big and it feels like the CCP is applying pressure to the CEOs. And High-Flyer is uh, the company behind DeepSeek, is in a very unique position where the founder has an immense amount of control and uh, you know, no matter what you think of...

Two billion of his own money, really low dilution round.

Yeah. And I'm pretty sure he's a solo founder who like owns probably like majority control, at least majority voting control, if not majority economic control. And that's wildly different than Anthropic where Dario had like 15 co-founders, tons of dilution from different funding rounds. And you know, we had talked about the SPV thing yesterday. Like there are lots of people on the cap table. Like Anthropic is going the way of like a typical American company where there are lots of different stakeholders. They might be a public company soon, which means the government has more oversight as the SEC controls a lot of what they will do. And so you're in this odd scenario where you could have a similar level of technology deployed in China from a very closely held private company that is up against a much more aggressive uh, government. And so what that looks like...

What that looks like functionally.

Yeah.

Like if you can't do e-commerce without disappearing for a week or something like...

Do you think you can do Mythos-level AI cybersecurity bug finding at the same time while having full control and not being a public company? Like, it feels like the stakes are much higher uh, for when DeepSeek, if DeepSeek is able to catch up. You know, there's some evidence that like China's on a slightly uh, shallower growth trajectory, but still, you know, if you take Dario's claim of six months, even if you extend that to a year, like something is going to happen there where China is going to have their own Mythos moment and what that looks like and what we learn about it, I think is going to be dramatic and interesting. And also it's just...

Just odd that like this moment there's this backdrop of all this stuff that's happening in AI in America and then there's going to be, you know, talks over like, 'You guys want to buy more apples,' basically. Or like, you know what, I mean obviously there's going to be more high-stakes discussion around geopolitical conflicts and rare earth, but we are talking about like tariff rates at a time when like just a couple months ago in America we were talking about like, you know, is AI going to like be able to take over for the government and like what does that mean and how does the government control the AI technology as it diffuses. So, very, very interesting things coming at some point. A lot of this will probably be pre-negotiated behind the scenes since the Mythos moment happened in America and Xi Jinping obviously saw it and can get ahead of it. But you do see this consolidation of control at DeepSeek and there's a question about, yeah, well, where does that go?

Tyler, do you have any thoughts on this? Am I directionally correct on the timeline or, you know, this concept like there's the graph that shows that open source is increasingly getting like further and further away from frontier models. But yeah, I don't know, it's just like so hard to tell like what's actually going on in China, like what is it actually, yeah, like what happens when the CCP starts to have, you know, more control over a company, like what does it actually look like? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting like so much of the way the US government exercises control over the development of AI is on like the FDA regulatory, we want to review it, we want to take a look at it, we want to take it for a spin and throw some prompts in there before we let you send it to Japan, for example. And in China it's a very, it's a much more industrial process where, you know, if the chips are coming in and it's a whole negotiation at the government level, there's just the question of like, okay, can you even get the data center, and it's much earlier stage, whereas that's not happening in America at all. Like there hasn't been any movement on the government saying, okay, well, we're going to, the way we're going to control AI is that we will be the, we will decide if you can have a gigawatt, we will decide if you can have 10 gigawatts, whereas in China that's sort of the de facto status quo.

Yeah.

We'll see how that, and can they continue to be pro-competition if they need to consolidate all of the Blackwells that are coming into the country into one data center, this network together that can actually train a Mythos-level model, right? That's a big question. But people are having huge FOMO over the summit. Dude, I wish I was in Beijing with Elon Musk, Trump, and Xi Jinping, talking business, discussing AI, real boss moves. Must be a movie, says someone who we're not going to read because it's a bad name in the thing. Anyway, speaking of Elon Musk...

SpaceX and Google are in talks to launch data centers in orbit. A deal between the two tech titans would give a boost to SpaceX's business ahead of a historic public listing. Google is in talks for a rocket launch deal as the search giant expands its own efforts to put orbital data centers in space. The launch deal would put the two companies in partnership as they gear up to compete on orbital data centers, an unproven technology that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said is the next frontier for his rocket company. Google is also in discussions about a potential deal with other rocket launch companies. They got to at least have a stalking horse.

I know. Sergey Brin has a blimp company. You know, Bezos has a rocket launch company. So, there's a very logical line from AWS to space data centers through Blue Origin. But we got to put some GPUs on the blimps. We got to start mass manufacturing the blimps. This could be the thing. I mean, no, there's no NIMBYism in the middle of the Pacific Ocean if there's just a bunch of blimp data centers floating around in a circle.

Yeah. I mean, it feels easier than space data centers. The space is free. The land is free. You don't run into the regulatory stuff. Cooling potentially free. Energy a little bit tricky down there.

Geothermal maybe. I don't know.

On the oxygen there, because how do you burn the oil and the natural gas underwater?

Diving bell tube. Yeah. Scuba tanks or something. Anyway, let's continue. Where are we in this? SpaceX and Google.

Speculative technology has been at the center of SpaceX's pitch to investors ahead of its planned IPO this summer, which is anticipated to be the largest IPO of all time. Last year, Google announced its own plans to launch prototype satellites by 2027 as part of a moonshot initiative called Project Suncatcher. It's working with another company, Planet Labs, to build those satellites. We're working on getting Will Marshall from Planet Labs on the show in the next week or so. We'll send tiny racks of machines and have them in satellites, test them out, and then start scaling from there, says Sundar. There's no doubt to me that a decade or so away we'll be viewing it as a more normal way to build data centers. A little bit of an interesting timeline there.

Yeah, a decade or so away.

Google was an early investor in SpaceX and owned 6.1% of the company.

The other funny dynamic from SpaceX's deal making recently is given that the OpenAI Startup Fund was an early investor in, I believe, Cursor's seed round, the $8 million round, OpenAI, at least the Startup Fund, will have some meaningful exposure to SpaceX.

Yeah, I thought it was quite interesting having that happen while the whole trial was going on.

Let's see. The company last week announced a deal to sell earthbound computing resources to the AI company Anthropic. As part of the agreement, Anthropic expressed interest in working with SpaceX on orbital data centers. Earlier this year, SpaceX filed an application with federal regulator to launch up to a million satellites for its orbital data center ambitions. That's crazy. I remember, didn't they get, what was the original Starlink approval? I thought it was like tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousand satellites. I'm starting to think like, looking ahead, there's going to be a backlash to like, they're blocking out the sun. Like we've seen the Matrix. This happened in the Matrix, but for like chemical reasons. But like if there's like no light pollution from this at all, it's going to be absolutely massive. Oh yeah, Pantalassa ocean data centers. You don't need to sink them to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Just do them on the ocean. Did you look up how many satellites SpaceX currently has in orbit? Because I think, I mean it's a huge number. It's over 10,000 I believe. But a million is a huge jump. But that should math out, I think we did the math, that should math out to gigawatts in space which is definitely meaningful.

Just over 10,000? Okay. But I think they're approved for maybe up to 100,000 or something. And so they go and get the huge allocation and then they start launching. Very, very excited to see the progress on Starship. Wasn't there a launch that happened or is happening this week? Like what?

The other story, this was back in March. Blue Origin has a play in space data centers as well. So I would kind of, you could imagine them and Amazon teaming up in some capacity. But you could also imagine Amazon saying like, 'Hey, if we're going to be a real player here, we'll probably need to work with StarCloud.' Finally probably finds a dance partner, if not multiple. Many industry leaders see orbital computing as a solution to the limitations of earthbound data centers. Earthbound is capitalized, it's a proper term now, which require swaths of land and power. These data centers are designed to be powered by solar panels, eliminating the major power constraint faced by data centers on Earth and one of the major ecological issues with emerging technologies. But there are also major engineering challenges. SpaceX made its name as the world's leading private launch provider, sending NASA astronauts to the space station and launching thousands of satellites as part of its Starlink internet constellation, over 10,000 apparently. As it prepares to go public, SpaceX has struck a number of deals that have rewritten its balance sheet, helped Musk consolidate his companies, including its acquisition of xAI. And SpaceX also announced a deal with Cursor as we have talked about on the show. Starship, what's the update?

Next Tuesday.

Do you have any idea what success looks like?

Okay.

But are they going to land on land or water? Because didn't the last one make it up and back but exploded in the water? Or was that the Blue Origin New Glenn? I don't know. Anyway, there's a whole deep dive on space data centers in the Wall Street Journal. They say, 'Is it a pipe dream or AI's next big thing?' They're pointing out some of the challenges. You're going to need thermal louvers, opening and closing shutters to block or allow heat, thermal contact, special bolts to separate items with different heat requirements, deployable radiators. Heat is transferred to special surfaces that unfold in orbit. It looks like a big... pull up this graphic showing sun-synchronous orbit.

But they say the radiators for data centers will likely be very large. I like that phase change materials. Materials that can change phase to absorb heat, like wax or salicylic acid, usually from solid to liquid, when returned to normal when temperature is reduced. Sun-synchronous orbit, 373 miles to 497 miles up. So about 400 miles up is when you get into sun-synchronous orbit. That's on the low end of low Earth orbit. Low Earth orbit around 1,000 miles, mid orbit 1 to 10,000 miles, high orbit over 22,000 miles. And so we covered a decent amount of this, so we can move on.

Yeah.

Okay.

obligations to curtail during periods of grid stress. That is a grid-tied architecture with supplemental on-site generation, not an islanded power system. I think Doomberg was like the other side of this that Doomberg did highlight was like Colossus is the exception that proves the rule because it moved so quickly and took advantage of so many different grids and there were power generation from multiple states at one point. And now there is pushback like there wasn't pushback when Colossus was built originally because data centers were not a hot topic. And it's the same thing with launching rockets like we were talking to someone who lives up in Santa Barbara. They're launching a lot of rockets from Vandenberg. It's getting to be a lot of traffic. It hasn't risen to the level of, you know, protest, but you can imagine that building 10 more Vandenbergs would be difficult because you go to the local community and you say, "Hey, we're going to build a space launch station, a spaceport." And they say, "Oh, that sounds good." Like you mean because we're going to go to the moon once a decade and you're like no we're going to launch rockets 10 times a day or a hundred times a day and people if they have an example that they can draw from and say oh well like that community doesn't like it so I shouldn't like it. That's some of the pushback. But anyway we can keep reading Shanu Matthews' post.

Yeah, let's see. Turbines solved a time-to-power problem. So it accelerated the deployment while substations and transmission infrastructure were being built. That's very different from do all of this off-grid and economically most large-scale AI load will still want to be grid-tied long term. Interesting. I have made this point several times but running your own generation fleet at hyperscale is expensive and operationally complex. Fuel logistics, maintenance, N plus one redundancy, permitting, emissions compliance, balancing load and supply continuously, multi-year equipment lead times. You don't just figure that out or want to do that overnight. Amin, the chief technologist at Google AI — does that mean DeepMind or straight up — confirmed this on a podcast and they literally bought a hybrid island power developer. Behind-the-meter generation absolutely matters. It's becoming a critical bridge solution during a period where utility interconnect timelines are badly lagging demand growth. But I'd strongly push back on the idea that the steady-state future is fully off-grid hyperscale campuses. The industry is converging towards hybrid architectures: grid interconnect plus captive generation plus storage plus demand response. They're throwing the whole kitchen sink at it. Anyway,

Um, related — yes — More Perfect Union had a post earlier and they're turning off... Nearly 50,000 people in the Lake Tahoe area have been told their utility will stop providing power to them because it's redirecting that power to data centers. NV Energy, the Nevada utility that supplied most of Lake Tahoe's electricity for decades, says that next year it will stop servicing homes in the area and instead direct that electricity to the growing demand from Nevada data centers. Northern Nevada is one of the fastest-growing data center corridors in the country. I read this, I was like, this is completely insane.

It's so stupid. Like, you read it and you're like, this is such an L in the making for the data center industry. What were they thinking? And then it's immediately getting community noticed. Okay. And a quote from the president of Liberty Utilities in Lake Tahoe says, "This does not mean the power is shutting off. Energy companies, utilities, and large customers change energy supply frequently." So, there's a supplier of energy that is saying like, "Hey, we're not going to renew our contract. We're going to divert the energy elsewhere." But there's a bunch of suppliers of energy. And so Andy Masley says, "Everything MPU posts about data centers is complete garbage. They have zero respect for their audience. Literally, no one here is losing power. This tweet is a complete lie." What's actually happening is that a supply contract between two utilities is ending and the small one is just buying power from elsewhere. And this was all expected to happen since 2009.

No way. Wow. The company that serves homes on the California side of Lake Tahoe is a small utility called Liberty. Liberty buys about 75% of its electricity from a much larger utility, NV Energy in Nevada, and generates the other 25% itself from solar farms it owns. Liberty then sells that to 49,000 customers. NV Energy has told Liberty it will stop selling them wholesale power after May 2027. It's kind of like Liberty is a coffee shop that buys beans and sells coffee to customers. The customers are the homes and the beans are the electricity it buys from NV Energy or makes itself. This is like your local coffee shop ending a contract with a specific bean company and starting buying beans from somewhere else. It doesn't stop you from buying coffee. Why is their contract with NV Energy ending? NV Energy selling to Liberty was understood as transitional since it started in 2009. Long story short, NV Energy was basically Liberty's only wholesale option, but a new transmission line opening in May 2027 gives Liberty access to a much wider western market and among other things, a much larger share of solar and wind and hydro. That's the whole story here. Ending the contract with NV Energy and opening up this much wider pool with much more renewable energy was the plan here, completely separate from data center demand.

Interesting. Well, anyways, it would be remarkable if all of Tahoe lost energy and Mark Zuckerberg couldn't charge his electric wakeboard because I somehow... he would hit the streets. He'd be protesting. I think he'd be protesting. I think he would get something done if power was lost to Tahoe. I mean, a lot of influential people are out there. So, um, anyway, all right, we got to talk about — set the record straight on that. We got to talk about Unitree G1. They build a new robot and you're going to love it. It's not scary at all and it looks very fun and safe. This is from Avatar. They just built the mech from Avatar. This has been pictured many times in science fiction and will strike fear into many people. Coincidence they use a racing bucket seat.

It is cool. It does feel very hacker culture, like it feels like this was like a crack team, a little skunk works project. It doesn't look as polished or ready for sale, but remarkable results. They're like, "You got to put this out so that the Americans cancel all of their technology ambition and just go back to the dark age." It is intimidating. Is it a coincidence that it was launched the same week that the summit is happening in China? I don't know. It is amazing that it turns into a horse of some sort, a four-legged creature. Although, how do you drive it at that point if you're laying backwards? It needs some sort of gyroscopic seat. That one hasn't really been considered because if you're laying back while you're driving it in horse mode, you're going to be — maybe you'll just nap. Maybe you're like, "Oh, I want to commute." You know, Henry Ford said if I asked people what they wanted, they would ask for a better horse. This looks like a better horse to me.

You get to work, you pop up into vertical mode. I'm fascinated by how they're controlling it. Is it just like a video game controller? Because some of this seems like it would require you to telegraph, like in the Avatar films, the operator of the mech has full — the input is the actual arms. So if they want to swing a sword, they swing the sword or they swing the machete physically with their arm and then the robot does the bigger version of that. Timeline until these mechs replace horses for police use cases. I don't know. There's going to be pretty crazy pushback if that's rolling around during a riot. I know. But the benefit here is that I don't think the mech will, you know, go to the bathroom on the ground. Obviously this is going to happen at some point. A lot of these developments are very early. I bet you if you give that thing a strong kick, it falls over and sort of gets stuck at this point. SA over on X had pulled out the funniest part. Yep. Which is that Unitree unveils the world's first mech, show it breaking down a brick wall. And then in the launch announcement, they say, "Please everyone be sure to use the robot in a friendly and safe manner."

Yeah. Wild. Egocentric data collector versus the mecha-mounted tea-op Chad. Absolutely wild. Is there another video of this? Oh, yes. This is an AI video, but we have to play the version of this getting hot-dropped into what you could imagine as the battlefield with four FC-2004 drone formation. Max payload of 600 kg. Unitree's new transformer mech, 500 kg of weight. That's probably without a human inside. So, you might need six drones. But, this is something that feels not that far away. Not that far away. Although, you drop that thing in the ocean. I feel like there are so many steps on the humanoid robot path where, you know, the deployment on a flat surface in a warehouse makes so much more sense than like standing on a ladder straddling a chimney in the rain and there's a little bit of mud and you use a power tool and dust kicks up. Like actually ruggedizing all of this is probably a whole second step in this process where you're adding more weight that means more battery. You need better battery technology. I don't think you'll be dropping this into the Taiwan Strait anytime soon, but it certainly strikes fear into the hearts of many. Well,

There's more humanoid news. Brett Adcock has a livestream going.

That's right.

Of their robots.

Yeah.

I do wonder how they're... again, I'm sure the comments are all, 'How do we know this is actually live, right?'

Like, how do we know?

So, is this the actual livestream right now? It's continuing going because I pulled this up an hour ago and it looked, I mean, I guess exactly the same because it's the robot and they've been sorting for an hour.

Battery pack or plugged into the wall? What do we think?

What's the battery life?