It’s literally just taking the piss out of idiotic investors. Data Centers, AI, space, new frontier, new markets. It checks all the boxes to get idiots excited to dump money into your tech company so people keep talking about it because talking about it is what gets results. Hopefully nobody is dumb enough to actually try it, it’s an absolute scam.
I mean, space construction companies are happy to try it.
If Bezos keeps giving them money, who are they to say no? It may not even all be a waste in the long run, as it could be a “testing ground” for future scientific missions.
The advantage of datacenters in space is that the peasants can’t break in and sabotage your equipment. Only a very small set of nations would have the capability of blowing it up or somehow jamming its communications.
It literally only makes sense if you’re a billionaire worried about the growing unpopularity of your AI datacenters, or you’re using it for war and don’t want it easily bombed…
The advantage of datacenters in space is that the peasants can’t break in and sabotage your equipment.
If that’s your criteria, put servers in containers and sink them in the ocean. Bonus, no cooling problems.
But why not some remote desert?
Or the open ocean, floating on the water? That’s literally outside any jurisdiction, and mostly outside the peasants’ reach.
I just saw some in China using ocean water for cooling. I think they were underwater?
I seem to recall like 10 or 15 years ago, someone from Google was trying to put a datacenter on a large ship, like a cargo ship or something. Then the story disappeared.
A data center in space would be damn near impossible to cool.
I’ve been working on IT for quite a while now and the only certain thing on this business is that hardware breaks down. All of it. Only questions are ‘when’ and ‘how’. I’m pretty sure you can’t get NBD support to the orbit. And I’d guess that shaking the shit out of the hardware during launch won’t really help.
And that’s of course just a minor detail, the whole idea is so stupid on a very fundamental level that I don’t know why it’s even a news worthy.
Lots of radiation in space. Computers classically do not do well with radiation.
Or with waste heat-- a different kind of radiation problem
At this point, just build the data centers on another planet or on another moon
How far can this bubble possibly stretch?
Even putting aside the absurd expense, impossible power demand, lack of cooling and abundance of hostile radiation, what the fuck is even the point of a data centre in orbit? “Sorry, I can’t access my files right now, the data centre is over the Indian Ocean”. “Yeah, I’ve sent the email - it’ll be delivered in fourty-three hours when the satellite is next in range of London”. Yes, I’m being facetious but what possible benefit could there be for having ten thousand tiny, low-power data centres - of which you can only access one or two at a time - versus the obvious, existing, cheaper, proven alternative?
In the investor presentations, its mostly:
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Increased solar flux.
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Outside any jurisdiction.
That’s technically true.
And I assume they’d either be in geosync orbit, networked to each other in LEO like Starlink, or maybe just “training nodes” that don’t need constant ground comms.
…Of course, what they leave out is the infeasibility.
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As far as I know, there are no more orbital deadzones. We’ve got so many satellites, if not Starlink, I’m sure some other satellites could do the job of relaying to ground stations. We get live video of boosters landing in the middle of the ocean after all.
I didn’t read the article, I’m not AI, but isn’t this the point? It’s a ridiculous idea and to believe it…
Space being “cold” doesn’t matter since vacuum INSULATES.
it’s not even cold…! The matter that DOES exist in it is very hot plasma but it’s just really thinly spread out.
This is what I’ve been tearing my hair out over any time this comes up. If you put a computer in space it will heat up until it achieves incandescence. Which is bad for the performance.
Yea honestly, orbital data centers are the dumbest shit I’ve heard during this bubble, and a huge indication of peak bubble hype.
If you sell rockets and satellites, then data centers in space sound like a perfect idea to increase demand with other people’s money.
the pickaxes of this new gold rush.
Anybody Who Thinks Orbital Data Centers are a Good Idea
Is Suffering from AI Psychosis, Experts ArgueDoesn’t Understand Basic PhysicsTwo main problems with data centers. Power and cooling. In space the power is doable. The cooling is a major pain in the ass and always has been. There are only three ways to get rid of heat. Conduction, convection, and radiation. The first two don’t work because of the vacuum thing. The third is horribly inefficient. Just look at the ISS and the giant fins that only dumps about 70 kW of waste heat through radiator “wings” that weigh several tons. A single rack in a high density compute rack can generate 100kW by itself.
So yeah given the expensive and how inefficient it is, it’s a terrible idea.
Edit: I’m a system architect so dealing with data center heat is something I’m familiar with.
iirc the power is not very doable, You’d need hundreds of times as many solar pannels as are on the ISS to power a single modest data centre.
And at that point wouldn’t the solar panels act as a sail and fuck with the data centers orbit?
Do you have a podcast? I saw a podcast clip on tiktok saying almost verbatim the same thing
The radiators would be about the same size as the solar panels. Both would have to be huge to run a rack full of GPUs.
Radiators work because they have something to radiate heat into. Space is famously empty, so a radiator the size of a planet would only work as a heat sink until the total heat in the system was high enough to make everything glow like a heating element, at which point you dump waste energy as visible light.
You can radiate heat into the vacuum of space, it’s just extremely slow compared to doing it into atmosphere. Vacuum is not a perfect insulator in this regard.
Think of it this way, if a vacuum was a perfect insulator, how would the sun radiate heat to Earth?
There’s also the very real problem of data transfer.
On land you just lay down another fiber optic cable and you can double your data transfer rate.
In space, you have to deal with cross talk and interference on a limited spectrum.
Free space laser communications are possible, but even then you are only talking about 10s of GB/s, and you cant add more lasers or receivers on a satellite already in orbit.
That’s what the lasers are for. It’s a solved problem.
Not really, because it can’t be solved, just worked around.
Lasers are still subject to the inverse square law, but with a slightly different multiplier.
Also, lasers still have the bandwidth issue of not being able to double up the communication lines due to cross talk and other fun physics issues.
There’s a reason why fiber will never go out of style.
You’re just too small minded to comprehend the grand vision of business genius™ Elon Musk!
And Bezos apparently…
These chucklefucks are just trying to get some sucker… er I mean investor to fund the whole thing so their respective space companies can do the job.
And after doing to some very cursorary research other issues like…
- Radiation and reliability - apparently cosmic radiation is a bitch
- Lifecycle costs - I should have thought about this one. It’s not like when a drive dies in space you just drive down to the DC to replace it. And not mention we recycle out compute about every 5-6 years or so.
- Connection - somebody mention this already in the thread but yeah you ain’t hanging a fiber cable to a satellite
What if we run a really long tube down to earth to send water back and forth? You gotta think like Elon to be innovative.
The solution, then, is a downsized dc.
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Just nuke it. Bonus is that will interfere with electronics on all satellites in range too
Orbital data centers are a good idea if one wants to get massive golden parachutes that siphon money from all the investor cash that the entirely u realistic promises brings in. They are a grift that will most likely benefit Musk in the same way all his other pie int he sky bullshit does.
Being technically terrible hasn’t really stopped that from happening with his other bullshit projects.
Orbital data centers are the new “hyperloop”
Ignoring all of the disadvantages of datacenters in space, what are any of the advantages?
Harder for desperate people to damage.
Shit-tons of profit, if you happen to own a company that specializes in rocket launches.
Potentially greater power collection for use since solar arrays dont need to be built with the same space and enviromental constraints.
Potentially already in the data path for a lot of communications with satilites being capable of both last mile and backhaul communication.
Archtecture could take advantage of all three dimensions better again because of the extra space and different enviromental constraints (the big one being gravity). This is truer the more of it could be consteucted in microgravity.
Physical security. Its pretty hard for someone to sneak in.
Further failure domain segmentaion. I.e. hurricanes, earth quakes, etc not saying space is safe (good God not saying that!) but if you have a DC in florida, California, and above the earths mesosphere the likely hood that a disaster effects all three is pretty slim.
Closer data transit for interplantery or lunar communication.
Ignoring the costs and new hurdles of the enviroment this is what im tracking.
Harder to burn down in a civil uprising, space is neat, and able to ignore laws and regulations because cops are too dumb for space.
The light and noise pollution no one wants near them are offloaded to space?
Astronomers: Am I a joke to you?
Non-astronomers: What are you gonna do about it? Nerd!
Well there’s a headline that’s going to have a lot of sane comments under it.
