We are well past the point of these companies caring about their reputations. People are already losing their homes over this. Here is Penguinz0's commentary on a news report of GA Power eminent domaining someone's home to run a power line through it to power a data center.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bySJ-oVGtvs

The issue with this is that datacenters are inherent "suck" machines. It takes a lot more effort and cost for them to not suck then for them to suck, so "sucking" is part of their core design.

Up till recently, they were a rare enough object that distressed communities still saw the glitz and glam that they are sold with as valuable. Now that brutalist assholes are trying to jam them in every nook and cranny of the earth, word is getting out and people aren't buying it anymore.

There have been some attempts to try floating or water immersed data centers that mitigate or at least hide some of their suckiness, but these were hard and costly, so the incentives weren't there to do them anyway. Maybe now those ideas will resurface and improve, but I expect "bribe, con or sue rural community to destroy their quality of life" is still cheaper and easier.

Don't forget trucking in the cooling water.

I mean if we're replying with videos at this point, here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qpdUNMt2yg

Oh, well, if the CEO of a company who only exists to try to convince people it is possible says it's possible on a podcast hosted by a VC firm who also wants to convince people it is possible so they can make their money back then it must be!

I've always wondered who is gullible enough to even bother watching this kind of garbage, thank you for answering that question.

> What's the difficulty of a 1GW datacenter in space?

Simple back of the envelope calculations?

Let's assume your numbers are correct and that panels in space can generate 10x the power per square meter per 24 hour period (due to efficiency, lack of night, and lack of atmosphere/weather). That means 10 KM^2 are needed for one such data center. The largest we've built in space is ~3,000 M^2 on the ISS. So one of these DCs in space will require an array ~3,000 times the size of the largest we've built before. Or, it's going to require ~3,000 satellites, each with an array the size of the largest we've ever deployed.

The largest Starlink satellites currently deployed generate less than 30 KW each. We'd need more than 30,000 of those to generate this much power. Starlink has launched ~12,500 to date, with ~10,000 still functioning. So 3x the size of the functioning fleet that's taken 8+ years to deploy. Currently, we are deploying well under 5,000 per year. Let's assume we can come up with enough spare capacity to launch 5,000 per year. That's 6 years to deploy the first 1GW DC. By the time we get to 1GW, the average GPU is 3 years old. So we need to continue to deploy 5,000 satellites per year to maintain 1GW of GPUs that are, on average, 3 years behind current generation GPU designs.

This is all before we get to the economics of launching, the cost of the satellites themselves, heat dissipation, radiation hardening, hardware failure rates (~20% of deployed Starlink satellites are no longer functioning), etc.

> What's the difficulty of a 1GW datacenter in space?

Why don't you ask your AI, the way you did with your earth-based scenario?

It's the size of the radiators and the expense of getting them up into orbit (along with maintenance)

Most of my assumptions come from discussions like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876105

(1) these are not ordinary radiators because ordinary radiators aren't gold plated and don't unfold dramatically from compact shipping sizes (2) It's absolutely loads of radiators