lol WHAT?

AI datacenters are bottlenecked by power, bandwidth, cooling, and maintenance. Ok sure maybe the Sun provides ample power, but if you are in LEO, you still have to deal with Earth's shadow, which means batteries, which means weight. Bandwidth you have via starlink, fine. But cooling in space is not trivial. And maintenance is out, unless they are also planning some kooky docking astromech satellite repair robot ecosystem.

Maybe the Olney's lesions are starting to take their toll.

Weirdest freaking timeline.

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crote 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The shadow thing can be solved by using a sun-synchronous orbit. See for example the TRACE solar observation satellite, which used a dawn/dusk orbit to maintain a constant view of the sun.

Cooling, on the other hand? No way in hell.

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clausz 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Every telco satellite can cool its electronics. However, more than a few kW is difficult. The ISS has around 100kW and is huge and in a shadow half the time.

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SJC_Hacker 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Cooling, on the other hand? No way in hell.

Space is actually really cold when the sun is blocked

So, solar panels on side, GPUs on the other, maybe with a big ass radiator ...

	▲	kristjansson 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Space is empty, not cold.

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giancarlostoro 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The cooling is the bit where I'm lost on, but it will be interesting to see what they pull off. It feels like everyone forgets Elon hires very smart people to work on these problems, it's not all figured out by Elon Musk solely.

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spikels 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Google, Blue Origin and a bunch of other companies have announced plans for data centers in space. I don't think cooling is the showstopper some assume.

	▲	giancarlostoro an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Good call out, and really interesting. SpaceX being the cheapest way to get things into space, it seems like SpaceX is about to become extremely lucrative.