I'm not convinced he's all that smart. Space datacenters seems like an unbelievably stupid idea to me, and I cannot imagine anyone who is ostensibly surrounded by tech seriously considering it. Well, no one sober anyway.

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peterfirefly 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that.

It's also a lot less dumb if you can make your chips work well at higher temperatures.

It's also a lot less dumb if you can space harden your chips better than anybody else can at the moment. This is what the Terafab thing is about (for now). Not about pumping out insane amounts of chips but about doing practical R&D for chips that work better in space: hardening and higher temperatures.

Such chips would also be useful for Starlink/Starshield and for Starship itself.

Putting something similar to Akamai/Cloudflare up there would work very well with Starlink. If the costs could be made low enough, of course.

Will it make any sense whatsoever for AI training? Not unless he manages to scale a whole lot of things drastically, and probably not even then. It might make sense for AI inference in a few years, though. Faster inference responses (via Starlink) might be worth some money.

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johneth 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

So it's a lot less dumb if 50 really difficult and borderline physically impossible things happen. On the word of a conman. Right.

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

> It's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that.

No, it's still dumb.

No matter how cheap they manage to make SpaceX launches realistically, there's really no situation that a space datacenter makes any sense compared to putting datacenters in, for example, Antarctica. If they built in Antarctica, it would still be cheaper than launching into orbit. You'd have lots of free cold air to potentially cool the computers, and you wouldn't need trained astronauts to fix things when things break. I dont' even think that building a datacenter in Antarctica is a good idea, I'm just saying it's less dumb than launching into space.

Even if you make CPUs that are able to work at a hotter temperature, you still have to contend with the fact that space is effectively one giant insulator and these CPUs cannot work at infinitely high temperatures no matter what.

Even for something like Akamai space data centers are a dumb idea. Keep in mind, this would be space, where people can't easily get to, so you'd need considerably more physical servers to be installed in order to have fault tolerance. Even if the servers weighed nothing, which they wouldn't, you'd need to power them, and in order to power that many servers you'd need solar arrays considerably larger than the ISS.

And what exactly would this buy you? Slightly lower latency for Starlink? With a potentially spotty connection, I'm not even convinced on that; I suspect any latency savings you'd have would be eaten by retries when packages drop.

Outside of a neatness factor, I just don't see exactly would be won by doing this compared to just setting up gigantic solar array in the middle of large deserts and building here on earth. You know, the planet we live on, where technicians can go and repair things in datacenters, because servers break all the fucking time, and these technicians don't have to get into a rocket to do that.

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pfdietz 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> No matter how cheap they manage to make SpaceX launches realistically, there's really no situation that a space datacenter makes any sense compared to putting datacenters in, for example, Antarctica.

Solar energy is going to expensive in Antarctica.

We can imagine a situation where the server hardware becomes so cheap that the energy cost dominates. In that case, sticking the things in space could make sense, particularly if extremely low mass space PV (just a few microns thick) can be made to work and also work cheaply.

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baggy_trough an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It gets you out of the reach of the suffocating regulatory states here on Earth.

	▲	johneth 11 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Are you forgetting that you need to launch from one of those "suffocating regulatory states"?
	▲	tombert an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If it's something that could even realistically be done, which again I don't actually concede based on what I said before, then maybe it would have slightly less regulation. Or, and hear me out, Elon is just a drug addict who makes shit up based on his 12-year-old-boy fantasies because it sounds neat and investors just eat it up.

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gamblor956 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It's actually more dumb if you can manage all of the things to make this farce successful, because high-temperature chips that don't require cooling would work even better on Earth than in space because the temperature resistance could be combined with ambient cooling, and there are far more valuable (and longer-lasting) things that could be launched with greater launch mass efficiency.

Also...hardened electronics have been a thing for decades. It's not big because shielding is cheaper and far more effective. The only practical use is military, and there are already DoD suppliers who are generations ahead of SpaceX on the hardened chip front.

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mustaphah an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> I'm not convinced he's all that smart

We probably disagree on the meaning of "smartness"

	▲	tombert an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not even sure I'm willing to concede he's smart by any definition of the word. I guess he's good at making shit up and making his investors forget his failed promises? I guess that requires some level of intelligence.