Why would it ever be more economical to put datacenters in orbit, rather than on some dirt cheap land?

ACCount37 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are no NIMBYs in space. No government permitting on land use. And solar power is plentiful. It's like having a dollar store Dyson sphere.

Making use of that is predicated entirely on being able to put a lot of hardware into space cheaply. SpaceX is the undisputed best at that, no one comes close. The question is whether their "best" is good enough to make space datacenters economical.

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delichon 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are many Not In My Orbit people on this very page. Many current national politicians would be happy to vote AI out of orbit today. Space is not an escape from earthly politics.

	▲	marcosdumay 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Space is not an escape from earthly politics. Well, Earth orbit isn't.

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kklisura 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But you don't have to build it in someone's _backyard_, just build it in a middle of nowhere.

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

That won’t ever be the case. It’s pure grift. There is literally no other actual reason

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

I am surprised how many people say that there is no reason to put data centers in orbit, when, at the same time, data centers are becoming the hated thing du jour all over the US and politicians left and right (but mostly left-of-center) are touting bans and restrictions to their electorates.

It is definitely to escape most political pressures on Earth. They will never be able to sidestep the US feds, but aside from an open war with China or Russia, all other authorities are out of the game when it comes to space.

	▲	XorNot an hour ago \| parent [-]
		People don't want to live near data centers. But companies find it logistically cheaper and easier to keep proposing to build them near existing towns and infrastructure, and then deal with regulatory fights rather then picking an isolated area and running an extension of high voltage lines out to them. Which tells you something about why space data centers makes no sense.

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newsclues 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The data link between earth and space has so much bandwidth.

There are sensors in space that send data to earth it gets processed and then the data is sent back to space then to the end user back on earth. If you do the compute in space you save the space-earth transfer time twice. Latency and availability of bandwidth are both factors.

There may be limited utility for this outside of military.

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readthenotes1 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Because dirt cheap land usually does not have dirt, cheap water or dirt cheap electricity.

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jordanb 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Water in orbit: famously cheap.

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ACCount37 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Ah yes: computation. Famous for annihilating water. Every bit you flip consumes an H2O molecule.

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kennywinker 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, how do you cool servers in space then?

Evaporative cooling is the way it happens down on earth - and that shuttles h2o molecules from dense useful clumps like aquifers and rivers to a less useful form spread out in the air. But evaporating h2o isn’t an option in space afaik - since there’s a shortage of air to take up the h2o. In fact I think radiative cooling is the only actual option in space.

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MrMorden 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That's the neat thing: you don't, or at least not in the megawatt range. A kilowatt can be done with radiative cooling but doesn't get you far with a hypothetical datacenter satellite.

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kennywinker 2 hours ago | parent [-]

So, somehow the servers can run hot in space without a problem?

	▲	MrMorden 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No; if you try to do this you don't launch in the first place because the amount of servers required to be useful can't be cooled within your payload budget.

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etc-hosts 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My job is mostly worrying about cooling paths, maintenance, power, heat transfer, lifetime of GPUs, and high performance networks. NVIDIA partner. I can drive to the datacenter. This stuff BARELY works here on Earth. Especially thermal issues.

Looking forward to watching spacex defeat physics.