Energy will be the biggest bottleneck to data centers on land. Is not an issue in space. Space is the perfect env for running compute.

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tavavex an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Space is an abysmal environment for running compute. It offers no real advantages over doing the same thing on Earth, and it's more expensive, too! Energy is far cheaper and more abundant here than in space. And get ready to figure out things like:

- Heat dissipation

- Radiation shielding

- Either the most complex in-space construction ever undertaken, or the most complex distributed computing problem ever undertaken (no, Starlink satellites aren't good enough, we're orders of magnitude away from replicating the speed and reliability of connections within a single room)

- Zero flexibility, zero repairability, zero upgradability. Either it's working, or you make it burn up in the atmosphere with no in-between. Add on that the rationality of sending mountains of precision-manufactured tech containing many uncommon metals only for them to be completely lost. This makes the pricing even worse, in addition to

- Already high costs for designing, building and launching all that in addition to all the extra weight overhead you're taking in components that don't do computation, when the alternative is building a glorified warehouse in the middle of nowhere.

It just doesn't make any sense. It's a project tied up in hype and created solely so spaceflight can be hastily duct taped to the AI investment hysteria. Ask yourself why no one brought this up before or outside the context of AI, despite the lowering of space launch prices and data centers both existing before any of it.

	▲	jonator 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Assume reusable spaceflight eventually brings launch cost close to the cost of fuel. This is close to happening. The overhead of building out grid and power infrastructure on land would then exceed the installation speed and cost relative to space based deployments. Also assume the compute that does make it to space has a short shelf life anyways so lack of ability to repair is a non issue. As we scale manufacturing on land this will increasingly be the case. China has already run experiments and served models from space, so we know the heat dissipation equation is solvable. Finally you’d arrive at a similar model that’s already proven successful with Starlink but applied to serving inference. The key question is speed to scale new deployments to meet demand. If the markets demand is near infinite, they will choose to fund space based deployments over slower land deployments.

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

Space-grade photovoltaics are >10x more expensive than ground based panels. Add some (Tesla) utility scale batteries and it can run 24/7. No need for expensive radiators or rocket launches. And personnel can upgrade the hardware every time there's a new generation of GPU's.

Putting datacenters in deserts around the equator is a much better idea than in Space. If you're really optimizing for cost that is. If you're optimizing for SpaceX meme-stock valuation the former wins

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

Perfect, minus that pesky law of thermodynamics.

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deadbolt 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What about the heat?