I don't think it's quite as crazy as you make it sound.

Per unit area, the radiators dissipate a similar amount of energy as the solar panels do, so they'll be a similar size. That's doable.

The upside is there's no land and power generation or grid connection issue; you get solar power 24/7 and the latency to earth is just a few ms.

It would also be possible to fly the individual satellites close together so that you can do high bandwidth optical links between them, i.e. you're not limited to single rack workloads.

A single GB200 rack costs about $3M, transporting its 1.4 tons on a Falcon 9 would cost a similar amount, around $4-5M.

That's got to be too expensive for now, but it's also not in a range that's totally off.

The idea is essentially a bet on land and power continuing to be a big issue and launch costs getting a lot cheaper, which they very well might with Starship. The rest is engineering challenges that are probably solvable.

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treyd 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>you get solar power 24/7 and the latency to earth is just a few ms.

Not at the same time. To have few-ms latency you need to be in/below LEO, but then earth blocks the sun half the time.

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svara 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It can be done in a dawn-dusk, sun synchronous orbit, less than 1000 km up.

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jltsiren 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Low Earth orbit is 90 to 120 minutes, depending on altitude. Even if the satellite is currently close to you, it will soon be on the other side of the world.

Assuming that orbital data centers make sense, it will be an interesting challenge to figure out how to best mitigate that. Short tasks that require little data will be easy, but everything else needs rethinking. Can you tolerate variable latency? Should you duplicate the data across many satellites? Or should the data constantly migrate from satellite to satellite?

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echoangle 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s at least 20 ms of round trip time, realistically much more. Especially since it’s not geostationary so the distance to the closest ground station will in most cases be much longer than straight down. I would be surprised if the average ping is below 100 ms.

Probably still fine for most applications though.

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asciimike 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Latency isn't really the issue here (lots of inference serving happening across oceans, which is probably 100-150ms RT), but bandwidth ends up becoming an issue for large scale transfers (mostly model weights, not the actual inference tokens/queries).

	▲	echoangle 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		With laser terminals you’ll get a few gigabits per second. That’s possible both between sats and to the ground station. Probably not cheap though.

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Guvante an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why are you ignoring all of the costs of actually being in orbit here?

A normal satellite runs something similar to 1U worth of computer and costs roughly what you quoted in total...

	▲	cortesoft 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Why are you guys rehashing the exact calculations that were made in the article? The article is all about these calculations, and they give ranges of values for each cost to see the the possible price points for everything in order to make it worthwhile. They take all of the bits you guys are talking about into account in the article. You might disagree with some of the numbers, I guess, but that doesn't seem to be what you guys are talking about.

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an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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asciimike 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Finding land/power/space to do a _single_ rack is not hard as ~every office building in America has 200kW of extra power and HVAC water at ~25C. Plus it only costs $4-5k to stick that $5M rack in the back of a truck to drive it there. No permits, easy maintenance, stable network connectivity.

Why use a satellite to do what your IT closet can already do?

	▲	semiquaver 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		People are fudging orders of magnitude because it sounds cool and they are stupid.