| ▲ | a11r 7 hours ago |
| That whitepaper puts the cost of a 40 MW cluster at $167m on land and $8.2m in space, inclusive of launch costs. |
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| ▲ | wmf 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| They seem to not be counting the $1B of GPUs on either side, making the difference pretty small. They also think launching 200 racks of equipment into space will cost $5M. |
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| ▲ | alienthrowaway 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| how much area do you need to radiate away 40 MW, assuming you want to keep your GPUs at a toasty 90 celcius. Every space datacenter fan/promoter enthuses about the free solar power, but forget to mention how the heat will be dissipated. |
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| ▲ | j2kun 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| that sounds ridiculous. How could it be so much cheaper |
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| ▲ | stonogo 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Because launch costs and density are completely imaginary. The whole thing is predicated on launch vehicles they hope someone builds eventually. They also appear to have profoundly miscalculated their radiation shielding costs and amounts, but I'm not really motivated to calculate that correctly. | | |
| ▲ | alexnewman 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | At planet we didn't have any radiation shielding. Why would spacex need it? | | |
| ▲ | rout39574 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | On the planet we have tremendous radiation shielding. The van allen belt and the atmosphere, to start with. | | |
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| ▲ | jasonwatkinspdx 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They're assuming $30/kg launch costs. | | |
| ▲ | singron 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Falcon heavy has never flown SSO, but it's probably over $1500/kg, which is >50x more expensive. Even the most optimistic estimates for a future starship launch cost is at least $100/kg, so it makes no sense to use $30/kg. The other line items are probably similarly unrealistic since they include their own launch costs as well. They also spec 300 racks of 500kg each, which is <40% of the weight of the comparable land rack. I doubt the full weight reduction since the racks still need to survive launch force/vibration in addition to fluid/pressure enclosures that land racks don't require. I think it's likely that just about every part of this report has a similarly cooked numbers, and we can just throw the whole thing out. |
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| ▲ | 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | jrflowers 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Because they have factored in a genie’s lamp, which they will use to wish costs down significantly |
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