00:00The U.S. is the clear winner in the AI race. That's according to ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet.
00:05He sat down with Bloomberg Tech Europe's Tom McKenzie earlier today on the sidelines of the VivaTech conference in Paris.
00:12Here's what he had to say about his thoughts on the global AI race.
00:16If we compare how we do on the entire ecosystem versus the U.S. and China, I think today the
00:23U.S. is a clear winner.
00:24I mean, they are looking at champion across the entire AI semi-ecosystem.
00:30I think the one place they were missing a bit out was manufacturing.
00:34And I think they have been extremely aggressive in bringing some key company to manufacture in the U.S.
00:40They can do that because they buy chips.
00:43ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet. Back to SpaceX.
00:47Despite today's decline, SpaceX has soared since its IPO four days ago.
00:52A big part of investor enthusiasm stems from Elon Musk's goal to put data centers in space starting in 2028.
01:01We've heard from those bullish on the prospect, including SpaceX investor Sean Maguire, who said this about orbital compute.
01:10Every individual component here is kind of fully, fully proven by SpaceX, except for the compute side.
01:19But that is not it's just not that hard.
01:24But space does present specific challenges for compute, including communication between satellites and with the ground.
01:32That's an issue. Dan Roelker, former head of software engineering at SpaceX, set out to address when he co-founded
01:39Observable Space.
01:40And Dan joins us now. I'm really grateful for you to come in with your expertise.
01:44Right. When you read the SpaceX prospectus, it's like, OK, the big picture.
01:49Get it. Space data centers in space as early as 2028.
01:53One of the things we focus on the show is the ability for communication, RF, but also laser.
02:00Try and summarize the challenge for us.
02:03Yeah. You know, like everyone's known for a long time that laser communication is the next generation of communication for
02:10space.
02:10You saw that really as Starlink was getting built with the ISL links between satellites that are in orbit.
02:17But it's, you know, because it's in space, there's no like atmospheric conditions or challenges really establishing optical links.
02:24One of the big challenges you kind of have, though, going from space to ground and ground to space is
02:28obviously the atmosphere.
02:29But everyone kind of knows that solving those technical challenges or what's going to provide the really like 10 to
02:35100 times the bandwidth throughput that you're going to want.
02:38And continue like low latency that we need for kind of expanding the space.
02:43That's what we're doing here.
02:44Yeah.
02:45No, no, no, no. I'm sorry to interrupt you.
02:47I guess that the easiest way to help the tech audience understand is like, what are the current limitations of
02:53existing generations of hardware and software in that environment in space?
02:58Yeah, so, you know, I think from being able to deploy these ground stations for laser communications at scale on
03:05Earth to communicate is definitely one of the challenges.
03:09There's a lot of technical challenges as well around being able to correct like the kind of waveform and wavefront
03:15for laser communication and around like adaptive optics as you're basically receiving the light on our ground stations.
03:21These are all like very active challenges, but we've actually made as a industry a lot of like advancements to
03:31make this feasible at this point.
03:33The data centers in space now is really going to require laser comm to be the primary mechanism of communication
03:40moving forward.
03:41So the timing works out really well.
03:43There's still challenges ahead, but it is, I'd say, like commercially viable at this point.
03:48And so that's why we're really excited about being able to get these deployed at scale over the next six
03:55to 12 months.
03:56Observable Space, the world's largest vertically integrated hardware and software company for space observation.
04:04But you are working on the laser component.
04:07That's right.
04:07Why is laser the best technology?
04:11There's a few different things that make it clearly the winner over RF.
04:16First, just pure speed.
04:17It's 10 to 100 times faster.
04:19The second is there's no spectrum management.
04:22You know, a lot of times with the RF bands, you have to work with different countries to be able
04:26to manage who owns the spectrum and how that's kind of being used and serviced from space.
04:33And then the other one that is really important, especially for kind of military defense purposes, is the privacy of
04:40it.
04:40It's a very point-to-point communication.
04:42So it's extremely hard to eavesdrop on and be able to collect that communication.
04:47You have to be in a very specific area where the ground station is located at in order to collect
04:53any signals.
04:53So from a military perspective, this is like a clear winner.
04:57And most future constellations for defense purposes are going to be optical first in the deep forward.
05:03Dan, the basic idea of SpaceX going public is also that it will shine a light on commercial space.
05:09You know, SpaceX likes to do a lot of stuff itself.
05:12But do you see a kind of ripple effect or even an opportunity to work with SpaceX on those technologies?
05:18Yeah, totally.
05:19Like, you know, SpaceX, like we're, we love SpaceX.
05:23It's really the company that's defining the future of space.
05:27So, you know, partnerships with them, like we work with them and we continue to like, would love to expand
05:32our relationship with SpaceX moving forward.
05:34I do think you're going to see over this next phase of space technology development, you know, people starting to
05:42unstack, kind of pull out the different stacks in the space technology spectrum.
05:48It's kind of similar to like how this happened in the early days of the Internet, when if you were
05:52going to be an Internet company, you had to do all the things.
05:55You know, you were a data center.
05:57You were like a website.
05:58You were doing networking.
05:59You know, as the space economy and kind of space technology matures, you're going to see these different layers being
06:06pulled out.
06:07We're that communication, optical communication infrastructure layer that is now pulled out and people can just buy our products off
06:15the shelf, turnkey solutions to establish optical cons from Earth to space and space to Earth.
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