According to Sawyer Merritt on X, Elon Musk said the cost of deploying AI in space will fall below the cost of terrestrial AI within 2–3 years, noting that operations in space get easier over time. As reported by Sawyer Merritt, this implies near-term opportunities for space-based inference at scale—such as Earth observation analytics, inter-satellite routing, and edge model serving on Starlink-class constellations—where reduced thermal constraints and abundant solar power could lower total cost of ownership versus ground data centers. According to the cited post, if realized, companies building radiation-hardened accelerators, on-orbit model update pipelines, and space-to-cloud MLOps could gain first-mover advantages in latency-sensitive markets including disaster monitoring, maritime tracking, and global connectivity.