alt Hacker NewsxAI joins SpaceX
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A former NASA engineer with a PhD in space electronics who later worked at Google for 10 years wrote an article about why datacenters in space are very technically challenging:
https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
I don't have any specialized knowledge of the physics but I saw an article suggesting the real reason for the push to build them in space is to hedge against political pushback preventing construction on Earth.
I can't find the original article but here is one about datacenter pushback:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-08-20/ai-and...
But even if political pushback on Earth is the real reason, it still seems datacenters in space are extremely technically challenging/impossible to build.
SpaceX is too big to fail. It's important for national security.
I wonder if Elon wants to tangle all his businesses into SpaceX so they are all kept afloat by SpaceX's importance.
As a SpaceX fan, I am saddened by this news.
The only reason for xAI to join SpaceX is to offload Elon's Twitter debt in the upcoming IPO.
Either this is a straight up con, or Musk found a glitch in physics. It's extremely difficult to keep things cold in space.
The Goalpost shift continues, If elon were working for me, I would have fired him for having never delivered on any of his projects.
Hyperloop > Neuralink > Self-Driving Cars > Robotaxi fleets > Personal Robots > Orbital Datacenters > [Insert next]
> "The only logical solution therefore is to transport these resource-intensive efforts to a location with vast power and space. I mean, space is called 'space' for a reason. [crying laughing emoji]"
This is all the reasoning provided. It is quite sad how a company I admired so much has become embroiled in financial doohickery.
> The basic math is that launching a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, with no ongoing operational or maintenance needs. Ultimately, there is a path to launching 1 TW/year from Earth.
> My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.
This is so obviously false. For one thing, in what fantasy world would the ongoing operational and maintenance needs be 0?
If you had told me 4 years ago that Twitter would be merged into SpaceX I would have called you crazy. Yet here we are..
Anyone remember the quote by Russ Hanneman on SV [0] - "No Revenue, means you're potential pure play"
We know datacenters in space - sound plausible enough - yet not practical - hence they're potential pure play - also you can have massive solar in space - unlimited space -- etc -- all true -- but how economical / practical is it ?
yet we know on earth - to power the whole earth with solar - only a fraction of the land is needed. Hell it's even in the Tesla Master Plan v3 docs [1] - current limitation being storage & distribution
so all you - are now witnessing to the greatest scam ever pulled on earth.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo [1]: https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf
Seems like a great way to play games with moving money around. Come up with a "valuation" and then "acquire".
From the Big Short (movie)
Jared Vennett (narration): "In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating agency's executives went to jail. The SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivatives industries."
"Just kidding. Banks took the money the American people gave them, and they used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby the Congress to kill big reform. And then they blamed immigrants and poor people, and this time even teachers."
<elon venture> rescues failing <elon venture> here have some <unattainable goals> the shareholders love that shiz.
This is why I come to this site. Obviously, Twitter's financials are struggling and theres more than a few people rich people who don't want to take the hit... but we can all drop that for a second to discuss the plausibility of data centers in space. Some links and comments I enjoyed:
* https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station
* "Technically challenging", a nice way to say "impossible"
* "I’m not that smart, but if I were, I would be thinking this is an extended way to move the losses from the Twitter purchase on to the public markets."
* "ISS radiators run on water and ammonia. Think about how much a kg costs to lift to space and you'll see the economics of space data centers fall apart real fast. Plus, if the radiator springs a leak the satellite is scrap."
* "5,000 Starship launches to match the solar/heat budget of the 10GW "Stargate" OpenAI datacenter. The Falcon 9 family has achieved over 600 launches." [nerdsniper]
* "No, we just "assume" (i.e. know) that radiation in a vacuum is a really bad way of dissipating heat, to the point that we use vacuum as a very effective insulator on earth."
* "World's Best At Surfing A Temporary Hyperinflation Wave is not a life goal to really be proud of tbh"Just a neat bit of financial engineering. You can tell because Elon picked SpaceX instead of Tesla – which would have actually made sense at some level (Optimus Robots + AI). But Tesla is public and so he'd need to follow laws and reporting requirements.
Elon didn't want to get outshined after Sam Altman suggested that "maybe we build a big Dyson sphere around the solar system". When will people realize that these "geniuses" are only good at making money, and any benefit to society is coincidental.
> In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale.
I never questioned it.
Space is also extremely cold, and if it's as dense as Musk cooling won't be an issue.
> scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!
I didn't realize SpaceX's media press is even cringer than Elon's average tweet...
I still don't understand the "data center in space" narrative. How are they going to solve the cooling issue?
Grrreat! Grok in Space... now AI-generated non-consensual sexual materials can be made completely outside the jurisdiction of any earthly body!
Rah rah. Line goes up!
I am concerned, and haven’t seen anyone else point this out yet, that Musk will move Grok’s CSAM generation capabilities to space to be beyond the reach of terrestrial policing. Does this create some sort of legal loophole here so Musk can do this with impunity?
Too me this smells of projected cash desperation. Do people actually pay for Grok?
isn't this just fraud in broad daylight? I don't get it. Why not at least try to hide it?
Thoughts:
1. What in the circular funding? This feels more like a financing scheme founding it under X/Twitter and then spinning it over to SpaceX. I suspect some debt is disappearing or taxes aren't getting assessed because of this move.
2. The only thing harder than harnessing "a millionth of the sun's power" on Earth would be launching enough material into space to do the same thing. And that's not even a reason for SpaceX to own an AI company, at least not at this point. The current AI isn't going to help with the engineering to do that. Right now hiring 20-somethings fresh out of college is way cheaper and SpaceX has been very successful with that.
quick edit: dang, I even got point 1 backwards. xAI owns X/Twitter, and that means that SpaceX now owns X/Twitter as well as an AI company. Super suspicious that SpaceX could actually think that buying the social media part (a significant portion of xAI's value) would be worth it.
Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea: https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
Discussed earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087616
There is literally an emoji in the middle of the announcement post. Very on brand for Elon.
I thought xAi previously merged with twitter, so all of this is now rolled into SpaceX? Atleast the investors in xAi and the original financiers in twitter get a breather. SpaceX is the new bandaid for this hot mess. Let’s see if this ends up rotting SpaceX or if it gets healed.
Seems like a way to put a lot of junk in space. If thats in earth orbit it will lead to a lot of junk falling from the sky in 10 years. If it all burns up that will be a lot of nasty shit in the atmosphere - millions of tons!
The really skeptical take here is that eventually all of Musk's companies merge, or at least the biggest ones, for juicing that market value to get that $1T payout. Looking at Tesla.
Related: NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission [1]. Blue Origin could snatch SpaceX's Starship lander contract. This looks increasingly a good idea.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/20/science/nasa-spacex-moon-land...
https://www.spacex.com/updates#xai-joins-spacex additionally the longer article on SpaceX site
IF we develop beyond earth...then AI, robots and connectivity will likely be huge parts of it.
+ spacex already is the best way for many payloads to get to space.
+ starlink is already the best low orbit based connectivity solution.
+ x is already a great way to train virtual world AI.
+ tesla (and its robots) is a great way to train physical world AI.
+ space takes big $ and talent - this combo would have both.
the IF at the top is just that. but feels like an interesting convo for this crowd.
Kind of a bad look - but I can't precisely say why. Maybe he thinks he can raise more capital this way than he could for each company separately? Especially raising more money for X might be quite hard - they seem to be quite a bit behind on the revenue side compared to OpenAI / Anthropic. With both companies merged he might just find enough retail investors willing to buy at sky high valuations.
Accountants will be studying the deals and cyclical valuations of AI companies in the same way we study bank runs and FDIC insurance today.
Doesn't the idea of Orbital Datacenters imply that the constraining resource right now is physical space, and not compute, electricity, etc?
Did we suddenly solve the electricity problem, or the compute problem? As far as im aware there are still plenty of datacenters being planned and built right now.
This is definitely better than merging with Tesla.
They can sell xAI/Grok to all automobile companies along with Tesla and other businesses(X.com included) just like the SpaceX services.
It would good to see how it was valued.
They must have linked the wrong press release /s. I would have expected a press release about SpaceX acquiring xAI to talk about why they did that. Or at least mention xAI beyond the first paragraph. This is just Elon talking about space data centers
If investors are falling for it, I guess all we can hope for is that the government doesn't bail it out!
This makes me genuinely sad. SpaceX was the one thing of his that Elon has largely avoided screwing up. Imho, this is in large part due to Gwynne Shotwell. She seems to have the personality (not to mention, personal wealth) to kick Elon in the head when he tries to mess things up.
What’s happening now is nothing more than a transparent effort to couple the AI hype-wagon to SpaceX in order to drive the valuation higher in the minds of investors who still think that LLMs will completely transform society.
I’ll be thrilled if the rocket folks can avoid being distracted by this nonsense, but I’m not optimistic.
I’ve been following SpaceX since something like the 2nd Falcon 1 launch and this is the worst thing I’ve seen happen. Sad times.
Trails of those low orbit satellites wasn't bad enough.
Can't wait to see pictures of night sky ruined by... A data-center in the frame.
This is terrible for Space-X. They're doing a great job. Musk has left running it to Gwynne Shotwell, who really is a rocket scientist. Now Space-X has a AI business unit they don't need, a new money drain, and more attention from Musk.
Should have merged xAI into Twitter. A failure there would not be a major setback.
One thing to keep in mind. xAI and SpaceX both have contracts with the DoD. So it makes sense he moved it there rather than Tesla. Not sure I buy the needing AI for doing more in space or if this is to save sinking ship, but if one of his two big companies needed to buy it to keep it afloat it makes sense it was SpaceX and not Tesla.
I'm wondering if SpaceX's going public will be delayed. If not we'll see the first test of the public's appetite for what the AI companies' balance sheets look like
"Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization"
So, basically give ourselves Kessler syndrome. Or is Elon trying to monopolize orbit entirely?
> buy a dying social network for 44bil
> merge it with a company created out of thin air for 20bil.
> have a third company buy it.
put it back on the market for 1.5 trillion.
> Starship will deliver millions of tons to orbit and beyond per year
Excuse my naive physics, but is there a point at which if you take enough mass off of earth and launch it into space, it would have a measurable effect on earth's orbit? (Or if the mass is still tethered to earth via gravity, is there no net effect?)
> My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.
I have never been so tempted to join Kalshi
Whenever computer chips go into space, they have to be hardened against radiation, because there is no atmosphere to protect them. Otherwise you get random bit flips.
This process takes a while, which is partly why all the computers in space seem out of date. Because they are.
No one is going to want to use chips that are a many years out of date or subject to random bit flips.
(Although now it got me thinking, do random bit flips matter when training a trillion parameter model?)
> it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power
We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon.
edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial percentage of the Sun's power. A few trillionths per year.