Why restrict yourself to 100% solar? Solar augmented by grid is pretty great.

Also, you very conspicuously avoided talking about the difficulty/impact of a 1GW datacenter in space. One might suspect your motives aren't as impartial as you seem to think.

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mike_hearn 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The whole problem is difficulty getting grid connections on Earth. If you can just hook up to the grid then why not just use it for everything.

I don't have any motives, what are you talking about? I don't own SpaceX stock if that's what you're thinking.

What's the difficulty of a 1GW datacenter in space? The number of satellites it requires seems to be within the realm of what SpaceX has already achieved. If the calculations are wrong, by all means say so, I haven't checked them.

	▲	rented_mule 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> 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.
	▲	bronson 42 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> 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?