| ▲ | dboreham 4 hours ago |
| I don't think we need that many words. It's an obviously preposterously stupid idea that has been promoted only to defraud investors. |
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| ▲ | EA-3167 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Unfortunately most people even here don’t have a working knowledge of the relevant tech, and seem to lack a similar grasp of the thermodynamics. A non-trivial number still think that the hard part of colonizing Mars is the rocket to get there. What can you do? |
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| ▲ | rightnutwingjob 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Correct. And putting things in the ocean is only marginally less idiotic due primarily to sea water being corrosive, wet, and full of creatures that tend to want to grow all over anything. |
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| ▲ | NortySpock 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Microsoft did attempt ocean racks in a sealed container , and it sounded like the 3 year test ended successfully but was not renewed. I presume the cost of setup, teardown, lead-time, low power density when scaled up, and lack of convenient access for mid-life repairs made it not worth the trouble https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/natick/ | | |
| ▲ | horsawlarway 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, but that apparently proves the point of the poster above you. The moderate improvements in cooling we're not worth the extra complexity. So it just didn't make sense to do outside of a single media stunt project. Data centers in space don't even get the cooling benefit. The whole idea just doesn't survive modest consideration. Data centers aren't particularly dangerous. There's no forcing function to put them away from where people live. The best location for a data center is going to be a decent sized urban center with existing utilities (power and network) and acceptable land costs. There are nearly forty of them in Atlanta, people walk by them every day with no idea what they are. | |
| ▲ | cogman10 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is the sort of thing that highlights why space is such a dumb place to put a DC. Everything about storing a DC underwater is easier than it is in space (except corrosion). It's easier to access, cheaper, easier to cool, easier to get enough power, easier to update. Heck, doing a second story data-center resolves a ton of issues with today's data-centers (while being a bit more expensive due to additional structural support requirements). There are so many options for terrestrial DCs to overcome whatever problem space might supposedly solve, and they are all cheaper than the space solution. | | |
| ▲ | chmod775 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > except corrosion Spacecraft in LEO deal with corrosion from - among other causes - atomic oxygen atoms up there, which are eager to cause oxidation in almost anything they come in contact with. The rate of this can be greater than on Earth's surface, though I'm not sure how oceans compare for corrosion. Overall it's probably true that it's less of an issue than with sea water, but it's not a nonissue either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrosion_in_space | |
| ▲ | dgoldstein0 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | how is power easier? solar power in orbit seems like a no-brainer - no losses due to the atmosphere / weather, and with the right orbit you can get sun all the time. Was the ocean DC tide-powered or something? how does that compare? | | |
| ▲ | bayindirh 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It looks like ISS can generate 240KW peak from 2500m2 of solar panels, and runs at half of that nominally [0]. A single B200 can consume up to 1200W. A single GB300 system needs 14.5kW. So, you can only have ~15 (incl. satellite's energy needs) GB300 with ISS' solar panels, which is absurd. See [1] for the size of the panels we're talking about. People dream about Starlink-style close flying systems to aggregate them to a single data center. With these power requirements, it's more like an AI hallucination. If we can build way more efficient chips or run smaller models on modest hardware, etc. We may go there, but needing ISS sized solar panels to run frontier models in space? Also, don't forget the radiators. You also need those to pump that heat out of these systems. The outlook doesn't look good at this point. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panels_on_spacecraft#Spa... [1]: https://www.sgmk.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/iss.png | |
| ▲ | cogman10 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In space, you have to deploy all the power production you want to consume in the same package that's consuming that power. On earth, you can build a power plant miles from the DC. And you can use all sorts of different sources of power, tidal, wind, nuclear, solar, fossil fuels. All options. And like the DC, if there's a problem with any of those sources, you can go fix it or replace it with different power sources. If there's a problem with the solar panels in space, your DC is dead. That's both easier and a lot more flexible. | |
| ▲ | munchbunny 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In Microsoft’s case, they ran a cable, which is much simpler to do than putting solar panels in orbit. |
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| ▲ | cactusplant7374 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | How is Panthalassa doing? Anyone know? |
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| ▲ | blensor 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That being said. If I were an AI, I would lobby for datacenters in space as hard as I can to put the off switch comfortably out of reach of humans. |
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| ▲ | haglin 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The benefit is that they will fall down in 5-10 years. That's an automatic off switch. | | |
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| ▲ | bliteben 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think if we manufactured most of the infrastructure and maybe the chips or solar panels in space it might actually make sense. Nobody is talking about that though, I guess Elon is saving the we will make the solar panels in space for a down quarter. |
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| ▲ | rbanffy 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I would not expect that to happen any sooner than 50 years from now. If a flight to the Moon on a Starship really requires a dozen refuelling flights, then we need an even bigger rocket (because the larger a rocket is, the more efficient it gets). Then we need to develop and build automated and teleoperated lunar factories, maybe ship the electronics from Earth for final assembly on the Moon, establish lunar mining and metalworking to build the structures, motors, actuators, solar panels, radiators, find raw materials and process them into heat exchanger fluids and propellants, and launch the satellites at least to Lunar orbit so they can self propel to their destination orbit where latency is not two seconds. Even with an intelligence explosion guiding the development of all these technologies, it’d take many decades. | |
| ▲ | skort 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | How would it make sense? Have you seen how things are manufactured? Why would you want to make something harder and more expensive than it has to be? It's delusional to think that these things will work better in space/on mars than on earth. | | |
| ▲ | rbanffy 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Some metallurgy on the Moon might be easier - at least the atmosphere doesn’t want to react with the materials. For other processes, you actually want some of the atmosphere to do exactly that. We’ll need to develop base industries from scratch for these environments, but, eventually, we’ll get there. The downside is that it’ll take at least multiple decades, if not more than a century. |
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| ▲ | aaron695 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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