Maintaining modern accelerators requires frequent hands-on intervention -- replacing hardware, reseating chips, and checking cable integrity.

Because these platforms are experimental and rapidly evolving, they aren't 'space-ready.' Space-grade hardware must be 'rad-hardened' and proven over years of testing.

By the time an accelerator is reliable enough for orbit, it’s several generations obsolete, making it nearly impossible to compete or turn a profit against ground-based clusters.

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trothamel 2 hours ago | parent [-]

On the other hand, Tesla vehicles have similar hardware built into them, and don't require such hands-on intervention. (And that's the hardware that will be going up.)

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lugao 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Car-grade inference hardware is fundamentally different from data center-grade inference hardware, let alone the specialized, interconnected hardware used for training (like NVLink or complex optical fabrics). These are different beasts in terms of power density, thermal stress, and signaling sensitivity.

Beyond that, we don't actually know the failure rate of the Tesla fleet. I’ve never had a personal computer fail from use in my life, but that’s just anecdotal and holds no weight against the law of large numbers. When you operate at the scale of a massive cluster, "one-in-a-million" failures become a daily statistical certainty.

Claiming that because you don't personally see cars failing on the side of the road means they require zero intervention actually proves my original point: people who haven't managed data center reliability underestimate the sheer volume of "rare" failures that occur at scale.

	▲	trothamel 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2017792776415682639 For what it's worth, this project plans to use Tesla AI5/AI6 hardware for the first launches.

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jonah 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not only the sibling comments points, but cars aren't exposed to the radiation of space...