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

thephyber 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Almost none of the parent’s bullet points are solved by building on the Moon instead of in Earth orbit.

The energy demands of getting to the 240k mile Moon are IMMENSE compared to 100 mile orbit.

Ultimately, when comparing the 3 general locations, Earth is still BY FAR the most hospitable and affordable location until some manufacturing innovations drop costs by orders of magnitude. But those manufacturing improvements have to be made in the same jurisdiction that SpaceXAI is trying to avoid building data centers in.

This whole things screams a solution in search of a problem. We have to solve the traditional data center issues (power supply, temperature, hazard resilience, etc) wherever the data centers are, whether on the ground or in space. None of these are solved for the theoretical space data centers, but they are all already solved for terrestrial data centers.

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ethbr1 3 hours ago | parent [-]

In situ iron, titanium, aluminum?

	▲	notahacker an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That's a hard problem to solve. Invest enough in solving that problem and you might get the ability to manufacture a radiator out of it, but you're still going to have to transport the majority of your datacenter to the moon. That probably works out more expensive than launching the whole thing to LEO

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nkrisc 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sounds more difficult. Not only is the moon further, you also need to use more fuel to land on it and you also have fine, abrasive dust to deal with. There’s no wind of course, but surely material will be stirred up and resettle based on all the landing activity.

And it’s still a vacuum with many of the same cooling issues. I suppose one upside is you could use the moon itself as a heat sink (maybe).

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sdenton4 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The 2.5s round trip communication latency isn't going to be great for chat. (Alongside all the other reasons.)

	▲	zbentley 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		And 2.5s is best case. Signal strength issues, antenna alignment issues, and all sorts of unknown unknowns conspire to make high-integrity/high-throughput digital signal transmissions from a moon-based compute system have a latency much worse than that on average.

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AllegedAlec an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Still a vacuum so the same heat dissipation issues, adding to it that the lunar dust makes solar panels less usable, and the lunar surface on the solar side gets really hot.

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ahoka 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It has all these problems, plus more.

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kakacik 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, carrying stuff 380k km and still deploying in vacuum (and super dusty ground) doesn't solve anything but adds cost and overhead. One day maybe, but not these next decades nor probably this century.