For the sake of an argument, let’s assume "The Outer Space Treaty (1967) has a loophole. If you launch from international waters (planned by SpaceX) and the equipment is not owned by a US-company or other legal entity there is significant legal ambiguity” is 100% true.

To use that loophole, the rockets launched by SpaceX would have to be “not owned by a US-company”. Do you think the US government would allow that to happen?

This could simply be done by hosting in the Tor hidden service cloud. Accessing illegal material hosted on a satellite is still exactly as risky for the user (if the user is on earth) as accessing that same illegal material through the Tor network, but hosting it through the Tor network can be done for 1/1000th the cost compared to an orbital solution.

So there's no regulatory or tax benefit to hosting in space.

Untrue. Responsible for any spacefaring vessel is in all cases the state the entity operating the vessel is registered in. If it's not SpaceX directly but a shell company in Ecuador carrying out the launch, Ecuador will be completely responsible for anything happening with and around the vessel, period. There are no loopholes in this system.

In addition to all the sibling comments explaining why this wouldn't work, the money's not there.

A grift the size of Dogecoin, or the size of "free speech" enthusiast computing, or even the size of the criminal enterprises that run on the dark web, is tiny in comparison to the footer cost and upkeep of a datacenter in space. It'd also need to be funded by investments (since criminal funds and crypto assets are quite famously not available in up-front volumes for a huge enterprise), which implies a market presence in some country's economy, which implies regulators and risk management, and so on.

You cannot escape national regulations like that, at least until a maritime-like situation develops, where rockets will be registered in Liberia for a few dollars and Liberia will not even pretend to care what they are doing.

It may happen one day, but we are very, very far from that. As of now, big countries watch their space corporations very closely and won't let them do this.

Nevertheless, as an American, you can escape state and regional authorities this way. IIRC The Californian Coastal Commission voted against expansion of SpaceX activities from Vandenberg [1], and even in Texas, which is more SpaceX-friendly, there are still regulations to comply with.

If you launch from international waters, these lower authority tiers do not apply.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-14/california...

No. There is no "one weird trick" when it comes to regulation. The company is based in the US, therefore you just go after that.

Anyway, promising some fantasy and never delivering is definitely a typical Elon endeavor.

You misspelled 'hate speech'.

The main reason is that generating energy in space is very cheap and easy due to how ridiculously effective solar panels are.

Someone mentioned in the comments on a similar article that sun synchronous orbits are a thing. This was a new one to me. Apparently there's a trick that takes advantage of the Earth not being a perfect sphere to cause an orbit to precess at the right rate that it matches the Earth's orbit around the sun. So, you can put a satellite into a low-Earth orbit that has continuous sunlight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit

Is this worth all the cost and complexity of lobbing a bunch of data centers into orbit? I have no idea. If electricity costs are what's dominating the datacenter costs that AI companies are currently paying, then I'm willing to at least concede that it might be plausible.

If I were being asked to invest in this scheme, I would want to hear a convincing argument why just deploying more solar panels and batteries on Earth to get cheap power isn't a better solution. But since it's not my money, then if Elon is convinced that this is a great idea then he's welcome to prove that he (or more importantly, the people who work for him) have actually got this figured out.

If one kilogram of stuff consumes just 100Wt, then in one month it consumes about 300 MJ. So as long as things works for a year or more energy cost to put them into orbit becomes irrelevant.

To keep things in orbit ion thrusters work nicely and require just inert gases to keep them functioning. Plus on a low Earth orbit there are suggestions that a ramjet that capture few atoms of atmosphere and accelerates them could work.

Radiative cooling scales by 4th power temperature. So if one can design electronics to run at, say, 100 C, then calling would be much less problematic.

But radiation is the real problem. Dealing with that would require entirely different architecture/design.

It would make more sense to develop power beaming technology. Use the knowledge from Starlink constellations to beam solar power via microwaves onto the rooftops of data centers

Maybe they should try to build it in the moon. Difficult, but perhaps not as difficult?

"But why would you?"

Because the permitting process is much easier and there are way, way fewer authorities that can potentially shut you down.

I think this is the entire difference. Space is very, very lightly regulated, especially when it comes to labor, construction and environmental law. You need to be able to launch from somewhere and you need to automate a lot of things. But once you can do this, you escaped all but a few authorities that would hold power over you down on Earth.

No one will be able to complain that your data center is taking their water or making their electricity more expensive, for example.

ISS and MIR combined are not a "large market". How many radiators they require? Probably a single space dc will demand a whole orders of magnitude more cooling

The ISS is a government project that's heading towards EOL, it has no incentive to heavily optimize anything because the people who built it don't get rich by doing so. SpaceX is what optimization looks like, not the ISS.

>There is a lot of hand waiving away of the orders of magnitude more manufacturing, more launches, and more satellites that have to navigate around each other.

This is exactly like the Boring Company plans to "speed up" boring. Lots of hand waving away decades of commercial boring, sure that their "great minds" can do 10x or 100x better than modern commercial applications. Elon probably said "they could just run the machines faster! I'm brilliant".

I am willing to bet that more than 10% of the electrical energy consumed by the satellite is converted into transmitted microwaves.

There must be many power consumers in the satellite, e.g. radio receivers, lasers, computers and motors, where the consumed energy eventually is converted into heat, but the radio transmitter of a communication satellite must take a big fraction of the average consumed power.

The radio transmitter itself has a great efficiency, much greater than 50%, possibly greater than 90%, so only a small fraction of the electrical power consumed by the transmitter is converted into heat and most is radiated in the microwave signal that goes to Earth's surface.

Is the SpaceX thin-foil cooling based on graphene real? Can experts check this out?

"SmartIR’s graphene-based radiator launches on SpaceX Falcon 9" [1]. This could be the magic behind this bet on heat radiation through exotic material. Lot of blog posts say impossible, expensive, stock pump, etc. Could this be the underlying technology breakthrough? Along with avoiding complex self-assembly in space through decentralization (1 million AI constellation, laser-grid comms).

[1] https://www.graphene-info.com/smartir-s-graphene-based-radia...

Entirely depends on band, at 10GHz more like 40%, at lower frequencies more, for example FM band can even go to 70%

Inter sat comms cancels out - every kw sent by one sat is received by another.

I think you missed the point. If you have a 100 MW communicstion satellite and a 100 MW compute satellite those are very different beasts. The first might send 50% of the energy away as radio communication making it effectively a 50 MW satellitefor cooling purposes.

And it's not the same at all. 5x the solar panels on the ground means 5x the power output in the day, still 0 at night. So you'd need batteries. If you add in bad weather and winter, you may need battery capacity for days, weeks or even months, shifting the cost to batteries while still relying on nuclear of fossil backups in case your battery dies or some 3/4/5-sigma weather event outside what you designed for occurs.

That's with current launch costs, right? Nobody is claiming it's economic without another huge fall in launch costs, but that's what SpaceX is doing.

Over 10 years ago, the best satellites had 500W/kg [2]. Modern solar panels that are designed to be light are at 200g per sqm [1]. That's 5sqm per kg. One sqm generates ca. 500W. So we're at 2.5kW per kg. Some people claim 4.3kW/kg possible.

Starship launch costs have a $100/kg goal, so we'd be at $40 / kW, or $4800 for a 120kW cluster.

120kW is 1GWh annually, costs you around $130k in Europe per year to operate. ROI 14 days. Even if launch costs aren't that low in the beginning and there's a lot more stuff to send up, your ROI might be a year or so, which is still good.

[1] - https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/space/ultr... [2] - https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/12824/lightest-pos...

Noise insulation.

Death, and some science. That's it?

Achieving a zero-gravity environment, or a vacuum?

If they plan to put this things in a low orbit their useful life before reentry is low anyway.

A quick search gave me a lifespan of around 5 years for a starlink satellite.

If you put in orbit a steady stream of new satellites every year maintenance is not an issue, you just stop using worn out or broken ones.

> Solar panels in space are more efficient...

... if you completely ignore the difficulty of getting them up there. I'd be interested to see a comparison between the amount of energy required to get a solar panel into space, and the amount of energy it produces during its lifetime there. I wouldn't be surprised if it were a net negative; getting mass into orbit requires a tremendous amount of energy, and putting it there with a rocket is not an efficient process.

>That would make your solar panel (40kg) around $60K to put into space.

with the GPU costing the same, it would only double the capex.

>Even being generous and assuming you could get it to $100 per kg that's still $4000

noise compare to the main cost - GPUs.

>There's a lot of land in the middle of nowhere that is going to be cheaper than sending shit to space.

Cheapness of location of your major investment - GPUs - may as well happen to be secondary to other considerations - power/cooling capacity stable availability, jurisdiction, etc.

it is obviously predicated on Starship. All these discussions have no sense otherwise.

> or the real one that has thus far delivered only one banana worth of payload into orbit?

once it starts delivering real payloads, the time for discussions will be no more, it will be time to rush to book your payload slot.

installation of large solar plants is largely automated already

It is SpaceX/Elon who bet billions on that yadda-yadda, not me. I wrote "If" for $10/kg. I'm sure though that they would easily yadda-yadda under sub-$100/kg - which is $15M per flight. And even with those $100/kg the datacenters in space still make sense as comparable to ground based and providing the demand for the huge Starship launch capacity.

A datacenter costs ~$1000/ft^2. How much equipment per square foot is there? say 100kg (1 ton per rack plus hallway). Which is $1000 to put into orbit on Starship at $100/kg. At sub-$50/kg, you can put into orbit all the equipment plus solar panels and it would still be cheaper than on the ground.

source?

If anything, considering this + limited satellite lifetime, it almost looks like a ploy to deal with the current issue of warehouses full of GPUs and the questions about overbuild with just the currently actively installed GPUs (which is a fraction of the total that Nvidia has promised to deliver within a year or two).

Just shoot it into space where it's all inaccessible and will burn out within 5 years, forcing a continuous replacement scheme and steady contracts with Nvidia and the like to deliver the next generation at the exact same scale, forever

I believe that a modern GPU will burn out immediately. Chips for space are using ancient process nodes with chunky sized components so that they are more resilient to radiation. Deploying a 3nm process into space seems unlikely to work unless you surround it with a foot of lead.

Reminds me of the proposal to deorbit end of life satellites by puncturing their lithium batteries :)

The physics of consuming bits of old chip in an inefficient plasma thruster probably work, as do the crawling robots and crushers needed for orbital disassembly, but we're a few years away yet. And whilst on orbit chip replacement is much more mass efficient than replacing the whole spacecraft, radiators and all, it's also a nontrivial undertaking

This brings a whole new dimension to that joke about how our software used to leak memory, then file descriptors, then ec2 instances, and soon we'll be leaking entire data centers. So essentially you're saying - let's convert this into a feature.

> since building a datacenter almost anywhere on the planet is more convenient than outer space, surely you can find some suitable location/government

More convenient. But I'm balancing the cost equation. There are regimes where this balances. I don't think we're there yet. But it's irrational to reject it completely.

> Or put it on a boat, which is still 100 times more sensible than outer space

More corrosion. And still, interconnects.

> If you think there is no papework necessary for launching satellites, you are very very wrong

I would be. And granted, I know a lot more about launching satellites than building anything. But it would take me longer to get a satellite in the air than the weeks it will take me to fix a broken shelf in my kitchen. And hyperscalers are connecting in months, not weeks.

Swear that fella is like the Elon Musk of HN - when he talks about subject outside of his domain he gets caught out.

> you have things like international agreements to avoid, you know, catastrophic human development

Yes. These are permitted in weeks for small groups, days for large ones. (In America.)

Permitting is a legitimate variable that weighs in favor of in-space data centers.

Not 24/7 in low earth orbit, but perhaps at an earth-moon or earth-sun L4/L5 lagrange point. Though with higher latency to earth.

So what? Why is it important to have 24/7 solar, that you cannot have on the ground? On the ground level you have fossil fuels.

I wonder if you were thinking about muh emissions for a chemical rocket launched piece of machinery containing many toxic metals to be burnt up in the air in 3-5 years... It doesn't sound more environmentally friendly.

Parent just means "a lot" and is using 90% to convey their opinion. The actual numbers are closer to 0.083%[1][2][3][4] and parent thinks they should be 0.01-0.1% of the total build cost.

1. Assuming 500,000 USD in permitting costs. See 2.

2. Permits and approvals: Building permits, environmental assessments, and utility connection fees add extra expenses. In some jurisdictions, the approval process alone costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. https://www.truelook.com/blog/data-center-construction-costs

3. Assuming a 60MW facility at $10M/MW. See 4.

4. As a general rule, it costs between $600 to $1,100 per gross square foot or $7 million to $12 million per megawatt of commissioned IT load to build a data center. Therefore, if a 700,000-square foot, 60-megawatt data center were to be built in Northern Virginia, the world’s largest data center market, it would cost between $420 million and $770 million to construct the facility, including its powered shell and equipping the building with the appropriate electrical systems and HVAC components. https://dgtlinfra.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a-data-...

> Source? I can't immediately find anything like that

I’ve financed two data centers. Most of my time was spent over permitting. If I tracked it minute by minute, it may be 70 to 95%. But broadly speaking, if I had to be told about it before it was solved, it was (a) a real nuisance and (b) not technical.

So freedom from law and regulation?

He "learned" by illegally poisoning black people

> an engineering and physics problem that he will somehow solve

no he won't

Maybe, but I'm skeptical, because current DCs are not designed to minimize footprint. Has anyone even built a two-story DC? Obviously cooling is always an issue, but not, directly, land.

Now that I think of it, a big hydro dam would be perfect: power and cooling in one place.

> Now what happens capital gains disappears and perhaps turns into capital losses? Dividends have to go higher

This is not how corporate finance works. Capital gains and losses apply to assets. And only the most disciplined companies boost dividends in the face of decline—most double down and try to spend their way back to greatness.

Why do you say Amazon doesn't know what they are doing? I think among those mentioned, they are the best positioned alongside Apple in the grander schema of things.

Also you say meta will never field a competitor to GPT - but they did llama; not as a commercial product, but probably an attempt at it (and failed). Otherwise agreed.

"Gemini is practically guaranteed. With the ad model already primed, their financial resources, their traffic to endlessly promote Gemini (ala Chrome), their R&D capabilities around AI, their own chips, crazy access to training data, and so on - they'd have to pull the ultimate goof to mess up here"

Im not convinced on this TBH in the long-run. Google is seemingly a pure play technology firm that has to make products for the sake of it, else the technology is not accessible/usable. Does that mean they are at their core a product firm? Nah. Thats always been Apple's core thing, along side superior marketing.

One only has to compare Google's marketing of the Pixel phone to Apple - it does not come close. Nobody connects with Google's ads, the way they do with Apple. Google has a mountain to climb and has to compensate the user tremendously for switching.

Apple will watch the developments keenly and figure out where they can take advantage of the investments others have made. Hence the partnerships et al with Google.

Maybe the idea is that SpaceX has access to effectively unlimited money through the US Government, either via ongoing lucrative contracts, or likely bailouts if needed. The US Govt wouldn't bail out xAI but they would bail out SpaceX if they are in financial trouble.

I think a better critique of space-based data centres is not that they never become high growth, it's just that when they do it implies the economy is radically different from the one we live in to the degree that all our current ideas about wealth and nations and ownership and morality and crime & punishment seem quaint and out-dated.

The "put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space" for example, that's as far ahead of the entire planet Earth today as the entire planet Earth today is from specifically just Europe right after the fall of Rome. Multiplicatively, not additively.

There's no reason to expect any current business (or nation, or any given asset) to survive that kind of transition intact.

Walmart? It's certainly more successful in physical markets

Amazon

Only if training new models leads to better models. If the newly trained models are just a bit cheaper but not better most users wont switch. Then the entrenched labs can stop training so much and focus on profitable inference

iff "earn" == "receive"