alt Hacker NewsSpace datacenters sounds dumb and impractical to me. Manufacturing semi conductor in space is actually a pretty interesting idea. I designed a few PVD, CVD, and IBE machines before. Ion thrusters from NASA are what semi conductors use as their source anyway. I can see the business proposition for processes like MBE that requires -12 pressure. It takes days, if not weeks to pump a chamber to those values.
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FWIW, given how many places in the U.S. are passing datacenter bans, I'd expect space-based datacenters to make a lot more sense over the coming years just because it'll be illegal to build them anywhere else.
Low Earth Orbit isn't suitable for unpressurized/exposed semiconductor manufacturing for two main reasons: 1) it's not a true vacuum 2) worse, the atmosphere at that altitude is mostly atomic oxygen (O), which is extremely reactive and oxidizes everything
From Wikipedia, at 300km the atmosphere is around 80% atomic oxygen https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Msis_atmospheric_com...
Is it dumb and impractical when NIMBYs and folks directly opposed to your political agenda want to prevent any and all terrestrial datacenter development?
On Earth we have optimized for: single core speed, multi-core speed, performance/energy, low demand (for mobile), and performance/energy, high demand (data centers).
A new dimension to optimize for, that space is going to incentivize, is highest stable operating temperature.
Higher temperature operation sheds heat energy via radiation much faster.
Some post-silicon substrate research is aimed at wafers that can operate at extremely high temperatures.
I imagine given how often materials research pulls a rabbit out of a hat, there is a lot of head room for temperature.
It makes sense on paper.
Power and heat radiation are the solved problems at scale in LEO. 50+% of solar energy is attenuated by the atmosphere, so panels can be huge and thin and flimsy in zero-G and get twice as much power as on the ground. Space-Based solar power plants are being actively explored by the US, UK, Chna, and Japan. The real hitch is how to send the power to the ground via microwave without also needing a receiver 20+ km across that lightly crisps birds flying above it.
If the thing that needs the power is in orbit already, all you're doing is sending data, something Starlink already has figured out.
The impractical part is shielding, maintenance, and a modular design that can be remotely maintained from the ground. When you're already running a high-cadence launch schedule, those costs and issues narrow, and you can swap out a component within days.
Again, it makes sense on paper. It might not be more practical than a data center on the ground, but there would be trade-offs.
Space datacentres are an extremely silly idea.
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Given the current state of the lift industry and price per kilo, it is economically unfeasible to manufacture or mine anything in space if it needs to be transported down or up the gravity well of any planet. Not even chips.