alt Hacker NewsHelp me understand why not? I know solar power generation in space, and "beaming" the power back, was a naive idea. But this would actually use the power up there, mostly for training, but also for inference.
That claim seems reasonable. I have zero knowledge of the economics of launching and maintaining satellites though.
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Cost.
The economics don't work unless Starship is doing flights in quantity, and it has met or exceeded its cost targets.
Roughly, a single rack plus solar to power it in the $15m+ range just to launch. (This assumes power dissipation is handled via some means that does not require launch to orbit. Also does not include batteries.) Choose your own hardware for the rack, but call it < $5m.
SpaceX earning $15m every time someone launches a $5m rack would be a great business for SpaceX.
Use your own calculator/LLM, but mine is suggesting that the ~$7B Colossus 1 data center in TFA would be around $50B if launched on Falcon 9 (still ignoring cooling and batteries).
(There are obviously a lot of other asterisks. I'm ignoring power storage and heat dissipation. Maintenance probably doesn't matter given 75% of cost is in the launch. Network bandwidth could be a problem considering how DCs are used. Competition - if Company A spends $100B for $25B of actual AI infra, how competitive will they be against Company B who gets $100B for their $100B by spending it in Canada or Mexico, which they can do right now? Etc.)
None of this works without Starship, which has not set a date for its first LEO insertion test yet. Yet the whole point of orbital DCs is nothing on the ground can move fast enough, hence the rush to orbit...which can't really move at all right now.
No, it doesn't make any sense.
In space you get bit flips fairly quickly when using very small transistors. You would have to run stuff on fairly old hardware, which probably makes the whole thing economically inefficient for serious "computation in space".
As I understand it, the problem is cooling. There isn't any medium to take away the heat, so the only option is to slowly radiate it away.