Elon Musk just floated a radical idea:
The future of quantum computing… could be built inside the Moon’s permanently shadowed craters.
Not sci-fi.
Physics.
Quantum computers need two things:
Extreme cold.
Near-perfect isolation.
On Earth, that requires massive dilution refrigerators, vibration control systems, electromagnetic shielding, and absurd amounts of energy.
It’s expensive.
Fragile.
Hard to scale.
Now look at the Moon.
Specifically, the permanently shadowed craters near its poles.
They never see sunlight.
Temperatures stay below −200°C.
That’s naturally cryogenic.
No atmosphere.
No weather.
No day–night thermal cycling.
Hardware stays in a steady, undisturbed state.
That stability matters when you’re trying to protect fragile quantum states.
Even more important:
No air.
No human electromagnetic noise.
No urban vibration.
Quantum information survives longer when decoherence is minimized.
The Moon gives you vacuum isolation for free.
Instead of building billion-dollar cooling stacks on Earth…
You could let lunar physics do the work.
Nature as infrastructure.
This reframes space strategy entirely.
The Moon isn’t just for exploration.
It could become a computational frontier.
A cryogenic data center in eternal darkness.
If AI needs massive compute…
And quantum computing needs extreme isolation…
The next generation of infrastructure may not be on Earth at all.
It might be in the coldest shadows of another world.
And that changes how we think about both space and computing.
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