Will these space-based data centers run on rad-hard silicon (which is dog slow compared to anything on Earth) or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure due to the harsh space environment? Will they cool that hardware with special über-expensive high-temperature Peltiers that heat the radiators up to visible incandescence so that the heat can be shed with any efficiency? There's zillions of those issues. The whole idea is just bonkers.

Google did a study with their TPU v6

> For ML accelerators to be effective in space, they must withstand the environment of low-Earth orbit. We tested Trillium, Google’s v6e Cloud TPU, in a 67MeV proton beam to test for impact from total ionizing dose (TID) and single event effects (SEEs). > > The results were promising. While the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) subsystems were the most sensitive component, they only began showing irregularities after a cumulative dose of 2 krad(Si) — nearly three times the expected (shielded) five year mission dose of 750 rad(Si). No hard failures were attributable to TID up to the maximum tested dose of 15 krad(Si) on a single chip, indicating that Trillium TPUs are surprisingly radiation-hard for space applications.

At Satellogic, we famously flew mostly just regular cellphone parts on orbit. We did have higher rates of various kinds of failures than is usual on Earth, but hardware failure can generally be masked by software redundancy.

rad-hard silicon ... or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure

Somehow I don't think those are the only options. AFAIK Starlink is using a lot of non-rad-hard silicon already.

It's very important in this case to specify which orbit the satellite is going to be in. If you're in LEO like the international space station you spend all day inside the Van Allen Belt protected from all those charged particles that the sun is pumping out. You're still lacking the atmosphere's protection from cosmic rays but that's not a huge dosage.

If you go out to MEO then suddenly you're outside that protective magnetic shield and you have to deal with charged particles smashing into you and you want a large mass of water or wax shielding if you don't have radiation tolerant electronics.

SSO, a low earth orbit whose plane is perpendicular to the direction of the sun so it gets constant sunlight, is harsher than normal LEO orbits because it passes over the poles where the protection from the Earth's magnetic field is weakest, but it's still a lot better than higher orbits. This is probably where you want a datacenter to get constant sunlight and as much protection as possible.

The LLMs they hope to have in those data centers already silently accept wrong results.

Say what you will about the data centers in space idea (I think it's transparently stupid), but ML is generally resistant to random undirected noise. It's almost a requirement by definition that a machine which takes pictures and accurately outputs the probability that they are pelicans has to be pretty robust to nigh-infinite amounts of minor variation. That's part of the reason all the super low precision stuff works. It's only in the control logic or maybe the absolute precise chokepoints of computation where flips are dangerous, so most of them are harmless.

At this scale could you do shielding?

> or just silently accept wrong results

Silently wrong results are very fashionable these days, you know. Deterministic results are very 2010s.

> Will…

I think “won’t”. I could be wrong of course, but I imagine efforts to put servers into orbit will die before anything is launched. It’s just a bad idea. Maybe a few grifters will make bank taking suckers’ money before it becomes common knowledge that this is stupid, but I will be genuinely surprised if real servers with GPUs are launched.

I don’t mean to be facetious here. But saying “will” is treating it as inevitable that this will happen, which is how the grifters win.