> t's not that it can't be done at all, but heat dissipation at scale in space is an insane engineering challenge, the tech to make giant radiators work doesn't exist yet, and even if it did it would extremely costly to develop and deploy.

You are overstating the engineering difficulty. Starlink constellation already dissipates around 100MW.

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fch42 an hour ago | parent [-]

If you solve your cooling problem in space by distributing 10000 servers across 100 orbits then you replace one engineering challenge with the next; good luck with the satellite-satellite optical crossbars, and even more with the time travel beam shapers to get the communication latency between the components of your "orbit-distributed data center" to-target.

(the sarcasm is intended; there are some usecases for "space servers", around stealth for sure; to "scale it like a terrestrial DC" though ... dunno; not matter how I turn it, it just seems crazy expensive)

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Marha01 33 minutes ago | parent [-]

Communication latency and bandwidth would present big issues for AI satellites used for training. But if they are inference-only, then the latency and bandwidth demands are much, much lower. Starlink already demonstrates the required parameters.

	▲	fch42 a minute ago \| parent [-]
		Indeed ... yet the servers for that already exist and are largely ground-based - "edge" compute of the large CDNs through which much of the internet's traffic flows anyway. Will starlink build its own edge ? Maybe. We'll see. Whether it makes sense to have this infrastructure "colocated in space" if you're not also the owner of the "connection infrastructure in space" though? It'll come down to cost. If I were anyone else but SpaceX ... that's where my eyes would be.