alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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Space is not much of an issue for datacenters. For one thing, compute density is growing; it's not uncommon for a datacenter to be capacity limited by power and/or cooling before space becomes an issue; especially for older datacenters.
There are plenty of data centers in urban centers; most major internet exchanges have their core in a skyscraper in a significant downtown, and there will almost always be several floors of colospace surrounding that, and typically in neighboring buildings as well. But when that is too expensive, it's almost always the case that there are satellite DCs in the surrounding suburbs. Running fiber out to the warehouse district isn't too expensive, especially compared to putting things in orbit; and terrestrial power delivery has got to be a lot less expensive and more reliable too.
According to a quick search, StarLink has one 100g space laser on equipped satellites; that's peanuts for terrestrial equipment.
We have tons of space on earth. Cooling in space would be so expensive.
What use is having lots of space, when to actually build out that space you need mass, which is absurdly expensive to launch?
Launching a datacenter like that carries an absurd cost even with Starship type launchers. Unless TSMC moves its production to LEO it's a joke of a proposal.
Underwater [0] is the obvious choice for both space and cooling. Seal the thing and chuck it next to an internet backbone cable.
> More than half the world’s population lives within 120 miles of the coast. By putting datacenters underwater near coastal cities, data would have a short distance to travel
> Among the components crated up and sent to Redmond are a handful of failed servers and related cables. The researchers think this hardware will help them understand why the servers in the underwater datacenter are eight times more reliable than those on land.
[0] https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...
There is lots and lots and lots of space on Earth where hardly anyone is living. Cheap rural areas can support extremely large datacenters, limited only by availability of utilities and workers.