Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea

I asked Google for more information about AI datacenter in space. This was the first sentence, 'AI data centers are being developed in space to handle the massive energy demands of AI, using solar power and the vacuum of space for cooling.'

> After laughing at "the vacuum of space for cooling" I closed the page because there was nothing serious there. Basic high school physics student would be laughing at that sentence.

Always remember the magic words: dual use technology. The people pushing these aren't saying to you that they want to build data centers in space because conventional data centers are at huge risk of getting bombed by foreign nations or eventually getting smashed by angry mobs. But you can bet they're saying that to the people with the dual-use technology money bag. Or even better, let them draw that conclusion themselves, to make them think it was their idea - that also has the advantage of deniability when it turns out data centers in space was a terrible solution to the problem.

If you think about it, all the existing data centers are in space already. They're just attached to a big ball of rock, water, and air that acts as a support system for them, simplifying cooling and radiation protection.

If humans are going to expand beyond the Earth, we'll certainly need to get much better at building and maintaining things in space, but we don't need to put data centers in space just to support people stuck on the ground.

So many ideas involving AI just seems to be built off of sci-fi (not in a good way), including this one. Like sci-fi, there are little practical considerations made.

I don't agree with the logic that "something is hard/can't be done right now" is equivalent to "this is a terrible idea and won't work."

There are dozens of companies solving each problem outlined here; if we never attempt the 'hard' thing we will never progress. The author could have easily taken a tone of 'these are all the things that are hard that we will need to solve first' but actively chose to take the 'catastrophically bad idea' angle.

From a more positive angle, I'm a big fan of Northwood Space and they're tackling the 'Communications' problem outlined in this article pretty well.

As someone with a similar background to the writer of this post (I did avionics work for NASA before moving into more “traditional” software engineering), this post does a great job at summing up my thoughts on why space-based data centers won’t work. The SEU issues were my first though followed by the thermal concerns, and both are addressed here fantastically.

On the SEU issue I’ll add in that even in LEO you can still get SEUs - the ISS is in LEO and gets SEUs on occasion. There’s also the South Atlantic Anomaly where spacecraft in LEO see a higher number of SEUs.

The one thing that space has going for itself is space. You could have way bigger datacenters than on Earth and just leave them there, assuming Starship makes it cheap enough to get them there. I think it would maybe make sense if 2 things: - We are sure we will need a lot of gpus for the next 30-40 years. - We can make the solar panels + cooling + GPUs have a great life expectancy, so that we can just leave them up there and accumulate them.

Latency wise it seems okay for llm training to put them higher than Starlink to make them last longer and avoid decelerating because of the atmosphere. And for inference, well, if the infra can be amortized over decades than it might make the inference price cheap enough to endure additional latencies.

Concerning communication, SpaceX I think already has inter-starlinks laser comms, at least a prototype.

I agree with most of this post and think the problems are harder than the proponents are making them seem.

But, 1) literally the smartest people and AI in the world will be working on this and 2) man I want to see us get to a type 2 civilisation bad.

The layout of this blog post is also very interesting, it presents a bunch of very hard items to solve and funny enough the last has been solved recently with starlink. So we can approach this problem, it requires great engineering but it’s possible. Maybe it’s as complicated as CERNs LHC but we have one of those.

Next up then is the strong why? When you’re in space, if you set the cost of electricity to zero, the equation gets massively skewed.

Thermal is the biggest challenge but if you have unlimited electricity, lots of stuff becomes possible. Fluorinert cooling, piezoelectric pumps and dual/multi stage cooling loops with step ups. We can put liquid cooling with piezos on phones now, so that technology is moving in the right direction.

For a thought experiment, if launch costs were $0/kg, would this be possible? If the answers yes, then at some point above $0/kg it becomes uneconomical, the challenge is then to beat that number.

Datacenters in Antarctica or floating on the ocean make more sense than space.

It’s better than having your DC confiscated (by Putin, in Russia), or bombed (in Ukraine, by Russia). As some hyperscalers realized.

None of these problems seem intractable, just really hard and probably not being solved soon, but one has to start somewhere... so at least the billionaires will fund some scientists and engineers who will do that work?

- Costs to keep it in orbit.

- More junk whizzing around Earth.

- Inaccessibility for maintenance.

- Power costs.

- Susceptibility to solar storms and cosmic rays.

Risky/untried things aren't dumb because they're hard, they're dumb when they're more expensive/harder than cheaper/easier alternatives that already exist that do the same thing.

What about on the Moon? My understanding is that heat is the killer. There you could sink pipes into the surface and use that as a heat sink. There are “peaks of eternal light” near the poles where you could get 24/7 solar power.

Latency becomes high but you send large batches of work.

Probably not at all economical compared to anywhere on Earth but the physics work better than orbit where you need giant heat sinks.

Regardless of how terrible an idea it is, I wouldn't mind some billionaires funding R&D that advances the state of the art in thermal management in space.

“Terrible, horrible, no good” is the new “considered harmful.”