Data centers in space makes no sense

Don't let common sense stop you from a good time.

Data centers in space make sense when you want it to cost 200x more than on land, be unavailable for repairs and upgrades, and be either high latency or be out of commission during periods of darkness.

A more reasonable project would be repurposing portions of the ISS for a data center and using that as a POC for larger scale stations.

A pie in the sky

What if you just took some ketamine and tried again? Does it make sense?

I just purchased a sandwich I made from myself in a deal that values me a $1tn. I plan to make toasties in space.

No no, let Musk cook. This definitely won't be SpaceX's Cybertruck moment, where they completely throw away their first-mover advantage by wasting five years chasing after the egotistical boondoggle of a delusional megalomaniac.

If we won't stop what he is doing with grok and ai-generated CSAM, he will be completely free from oversight up there.

Comments full of EDS. Everyone is a rocket scientist in here also.

He's going to do a DOGE (memecoin not government agency) equivalent over phones new satellite links to his SpaceX sats outside anyone national jurisdiction. Worth the possibility of taking over being the world's global currency unconnected from any/all government.

It's lala land nonsense.

- Data centres need a lot of power = giant vast solar panels

- Data centres need a lot of cooling. That's some almighty heatsinks you're going need

- They will need to be radiation-hardened to avoid memory corruption = even more mass

- The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and will need replacing to stay competitive

- Data centres are about 100x bigger (not including solar panels and heat sinks) than the biggest thing we've ever put in space

Tesla is losing market share (and rank increasingly poorly against alternatives), his robots are gonna fail, this datacentre ambition needs to break the laws of physics, grok/twitter is a fake news pedo-loving cesspit that's gonna be regulated into oblivion. Its only down from here on out.

What is this website?

The website insists that you let it record your voice in order to show you the dangers of AI. Is it trolling the visitor? https://civai.org/talk

But it's absolutely amazing hype and memevestors love it.

I'm not sure datacenters in space have to make suense to everyone, or from the perspective of earth.

Taking a creative step back, perhaps datacenters in space support something with Mars?

As much as that might not seem realistic, I also have to counterbalance it with operationalizing and commercializing SpaceX, Starlink and Tesla relatively quickly when so much stays at the R&D stage for so long.

This is written by someone that is not in aerospace that thinks terrestrially.

Engineering is always a question of tradeoffs.

Launch costs are dropping, and we’re still using inefficient rockets. Space elevators & space trains, among others, can drop this much more, the launch costs are still dropping, even using rockets, maybe we’ll never get to elevators & trains the costs will drop so low!

Radiation shielding is not required for VLEO or LEO, and phenomenally more capable aerospace processors are near - hi Microchip Inc! There are many other radiation solutions coming, no doubt with nuclear power.

Satellites can be upgraded at scale, though for many things, it does not make $ sense to upgrade them, but fuel , reaction wheels, solar panels, among other things do make $ sense to replace.

Latency was technically solved in 1995 & 2001 with the first laser comms missions NASDA’s ETS-VI kiku-6 and ESA’s Artemis , and Laser crossbars for comms are common. A full laser TDRS no RF is not yet extant but soon. Earth to deepspace was just demonstrated by ESA.

Cooling can be significantly improved due to lower launch costs, heat piping, RTGs, TEGs, and thermoradiative cells, not to mention sunside solar and darkside inline radiators

Furthermore, it is very likely that as neuromorphics with superior SWaP emerge, we could see very different models of space based computation.

Economic tradeoffs should drive many of these decisions as I’m not discussing the other applications of datacenter in space

There are two very distinct kinds of AI workloads that go into data centres:

    1. Inference
    2. Training

Training is a whole other ballgame. It is parallelisable, sure, but only through heroic efforts involving fantastically expensive network switches with petabits of aggregated bandwidth. It also needs more general-purpose GPUs, access to petabytes of data, etc. The name of the game here is to bring a hundred thousand or more GPUs into close proximity and connect them with a terabit or more per GPU to exchange data. This cannot be put into orbit with any near-future technologies! It would be a giant satellite with square kilometers of solar and cooling panels. It would certainly get hit sooner or later by space debris, not to mention the hazard it poses to other satellites.

The problem with putting inference-only into space is that training still needs to go somewhere, and current AI data centres are pulling double-duty: they're usable for both training and inference, or any mix of the two. The greatest challenge is that a training bleeding edge model needs the biggest possible clusters (approaching a million GPUs!) in one place, and that is the problem -- few places in the world can provide the ~gigawatt of power to light up something that big. Again, the problem here is that training workloads can't be spread out.

Space solves the "wrong" problem! We can distribute inference to thousands of datacentre locations here on Earth, each needs just hundreds of kilowatts. That's no problem.

It's the giaaaant clusters everyone is trying to build that are the problem.

Next up, the Boring Company gets imaginary contract for underground datacenters, is now valued at $500B.

how much latency would a minecraft server in space have?

How else would you secure skynet against Sarah Connor?

Admiral Grace Hopper is famous for using a length of wire to explain to others what a nanosecond was.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/pentagon-embraces-musks-g...

Data centers in space make absolute sense when you want as close to real time analysis on all sorts of information. Would you rather have it make the round trip, via satellite to the states? Or are you going to build these things on the ground near a battlefield?

Musk is selling a vision for a MASSIVE government contract to provide a service that no one else could hope to achieve. This is one of those projects where he can run up the budget and operating costs like Boeing, Northrup etc, because it has massive military applications.

We were supposed to be on Mars right now, but I guess data centers in space are nice too. Kinda disappointed they aren't on the moon.

Facts.

Just do the basic thermal heat transfer math.

I'd be curious to know simply how large the thermal radiator necessary to keep a typical GPU server cooled would be. Do they completely dwarf the server size? Can you do something with some esoteric material that is not particularly load-bearing but holds up well in space to get around some of these challenges?

A thought experiment. Imagine that you had some magic way of getting all the electricity you wanted at the south pole, you had good internet connectivity, and the various treaties about the place weren't an issue for you. Would you want to build a data center there?

Seems like a pretty obvious "no" to me. Loudoun County is a much better choice, just to pick one alternative. Antarctica is an awfully inhospitable place and running a data center there would be a nightmare.

And yet it's way better than space. It's much easier to get to. Cooling is about a thousand times easier. The radiation environment is much more forgiving.

This whole concept is baffling to me.

(Incidentally, a similar thought experiment is useful when talking about colonizing Mars. Think about colonizing the south pole. Mars is a harsher environment in just about every way, so take the difficulties of colonizing the south pole and multiply them.)

Like I’ve always said love him or hate him Elon Musk is a SPACE OIL SALESMAN!

I can assure this author: strapping a company that lights money on fire (today, maybe not tomorrow) to a cash flow enterprise makes the IPO harder, not easier, in the absence of credible plan. The market speculates, but it’s not being completely irrational. I’d actually be surprised if we didn’t have factories or data centers in space one day.

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Data centers in space are the logical progression from the multi trillion business of m2m and edge computing. It removes all physical limits to investment.

Counterpoint: https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1997906033168330816

(If you can't xcancel it yourself your hacker card is revoked.)

*Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers*.

Disagree there are bunch of scenarios where Data Centers in space make sense. Like nuclear annihilation and having vaults across the globe to communicate and get back lost information because ground data centers would be wiped out by EMP from blasts.

Space offers some unique benefits that enable computing that’s impossible or very hard to do on earth. E.g. Super conducting computing is possible, which can be thousands times to millions times faster than current CPU while using very little energy. When the satellite moves in the shade of the earth, temperature drops significantly. It can be low enough to enable superconducting. When the satellite moves under the sun, the solar panel can start charging up the battery to power the ongoing operation.

If you read these comments carefully, you see that they can all be summed up as:

"That Musk guy is so naive to think you can put data centers in space, what a doof".

Similar comments were probably made regarding electric cars, reusable rockets, buying Twitter, and so on.

What’s there not to like? Superconductors. Free electricity. No cooling necessary.

Put those three together and maybe it’s possible to push physics to its limits. Faster networking, maybe 4x-5x capacity per unit compared to earth. Servicing is a pain, might be cheaper to just replace the hardware when a node goes bad.

But it mainly makes sense to those who have the capability and can do it cheaply (compared to the rest). There’s only one company that I can think of and that is SpaceX. They are closing in on (or passed) 8,000 satellites. Vertical integration means their cost-base will always be less than any competitor.