| ▲ | lesuorac 9 hours ago |
| When nobody lets you build a land data center they're going to make a lot of sense. |
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| ▲ | runako 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| A hypothetical operational space data center will cost a multiple over a similar terrestrial facility. It would be cheaper/more efficient to offer a municipality or its citizens a fraction of that multiple to secure approvals, now that the bullying approach is running out of steam. Instead of installing MWs of illegal gas generation and also still causing local electricity rates to spike, why not arrange to buy down the electricity of local ratepayers and also comply with existing laws & regulations? It's worth asking why operators aren't doing that yet. I suspect it's because neither OAI nor Anthropic have an extra $50B-$100B to put out at the moment. We'll see what happens post-IPO. |
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| ▲ | mchusma 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah, the Data Center NIMBY crowd is making these look real good right now. |
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| ▲ | wat10000 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Never going to happen. Yeah, we might get to a point where lots of people object to them in lots of places. But nobody allowing them anywhere? Mongolia wouldn't let you build in a little corner of the vast steppe? Algeria wouldn't let you plop down in a nice patch of unused Sahara? The worst that would happen is that it becomes difficult to build in convenient places. That certainly would be annoying. But the problem with space as the solution is that space is by far the least convenient place imaginable, with the possible exception of the bottom of the deep ocean. |
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| ▲ | grim_io 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's an if, not a when. A very big, hugely improbable if. Nobody? really? |
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| ▲ | piloto_ciego 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | I know it sounds bananas, indeed I thought it sounded bananas for a long time, but in a world where we can't get high speed rail built anywhere because of permitting, and there's an artificial scarcity of available land to build, they make a lot of sense. In space you can just start. Nobody is really going to stop you. | | |
| ▲ | jazzyjackson 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | People are going to be even more pissed off when there are more satellites than stars (I know nominally they’re not visible but they are shortly after launch while moving into position, and at large scale that would be happening all the time, not to mention the other side of burning up in the atmosphere after a few years) | | |
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| ▲ | arrosenberg 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The cost of getting them there will be absurd and even if someone was willing to fund it, where do you put the heat they will generate? |
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| ▲ | piloto_ciego 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | If trying to do it terrestrially is because the city council will riot then doing it on orbit seems like the better play. Just saying. “I can do it in this challenging environment or I can not do it at all” is kind of a false choice if you think AGI is imminent. Personally, I think we’re already there for KVM stuff, it’s just the goal posts are accelerating at an exponential rate the same with the capabilities. | | |
| ▲ | arrosenberg 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | "If you think AGI is imminent" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The rate of improvement has already leveled off significantly and there is little-to-no evidence that LLMs are close to or capable of achieving general intelligence. If you assume we aren't going to create a singularity in the next few decades, then no, it doesn't make sense economically to do it. Even ignoring that we'd have to develop a design that works in space, and even if SpaceX is able to significantly reduce cost per kg to orbit, it would still cost 15-30x more to build the same data center, and you have to pay that premium every time a piece of equipment burns out. It would be cheaper to build aircraft carrier sized ships to hold them or give every adult in the town where they are building a couple million dollars to fuck off. And again, that's only if SpaceX can produce an as-of-yet mythical level of scale. If they stop anywhere short of that, then we're talking about billions of dollars to build in space what you could build on earth for tens of millions. | | |
| ▲ | piloto_ciego 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Everyone says this about the rate of improvement every month, and yet, I'm not just basically conjuring the code into existence that's paying my bills and building my company. Personally, I know it's just my anec-data, but I'm pretty much convinced that for kvm work, we're already there or extremely close to agi in any meaningful sense. |
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