Assuming progress in industrial automation, humanoid robotics, artificial intelligence, and space technology continues as currently envisioned by these industries, we will in just a few short decades be able to deliver payloads of a self-assembling farm of robots to mine the Moon, create chip fabs, build, and ultimately tile the Moon with GPUs. The Moon has a surface area of 14.6 million square miles, roughly the size of Asia. If we very conservatively tiled even half the Moon with GPUs and solar panels, the Moon could sustain a billion times the compute of the Colossus cluster and, with a few turns of Moore’s law driving chip technology forward, even a trillion times the compute.
The Moon thus transformed will come to resemble something out of science fiction concepts of planet-sized factories or Factorio—a popular video game among engineers working on these very technologies. This level of compute would effectively turn our Moon into a planet-scale supercomputer and represent a giant leap in Man’s capacity to control our destiny.
While it’s difficult to estimate when we’d absolutely need a Moon-sized computer, we know that we cannot increase our planet’s energy consumption by two orders of magnitude without inducing a catastrophic warming—which we were on track to do even before the AI revolution—in around 200 years. This is a leisurely timeline when AI scaling laws have accelerated to mere decades.
— Read on www.palladiummag.com/2025/04/18/the-moon-should-be-a-computer/
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