alt Hacker NewsAnother significant factor is that radiation makes things worse.
Ionizing radiation disrupts the crystalline structure of the semiconductor and makes performance worse over time.
High energy protons randomly flip bits, can cause latchup, single event gate rupture, destroy hardware immediately, etc.
If anything, considering this + limited satellite lifetime, it almost looks like a ploy to deal with the current issue of warehouses full of GPUs and the questions about overbuild with just the currently actively installed GPUs (which is a fraction of the total that Nvidia has promised to deliver within a year or two).
Just shoot it into space where it's all inaccessible and will burn out within 5 years, forcing a continuous replacement scheme and steady contracts with Nvidia and the like to deliver the next generation at the exact same scale, forever