alt Hacker NewsYou operate them like Microsoft's submerged data center project: you don't do maintenance, whatever fails fails. You start with enough redundancy in critical components like power and networking and accept that compute resources will slowly decrease as nodes fail
No operational needs is obviously ... simplified. You still need to manage downlink capacity, station keeping, collision avoidance, etc. But for a large constellation the per-satellite cost of that would be pretty small.
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Unless I missed something the Microsoft underwater data center was basically a publicity stunt.
Anyone who thinks it makes sense to blast data centers into space has never seen how big and heavy they are, or thought about their immense power consumption, much less the challenge of radiating away that much waste heat into space.
An 8 GPU B200 cluster goes for about $500k right now. You'd need to put thousands of those into space to mimic a ground-based data center. And the launch costs are best case around 10x the cost of the cluster itself.
Letting them burn up in the atmosphere every time there's an issue does not sound sustainable.
You mean you operate them like Microsoft's failed submerged data center project [1]. When pointing at validating past examples you are generally supposed to point at successes.
But if we’re going down that line of thinking then it’s a poor comparison. I could open a data centre on the ground and use the same principle of zero maintenance, and it would be way cheaper and way more powerful.
But you could just run a “zero maintenance” data center on Earth and not pay to blast it into orbit.
You also have to get rid of waste heat :P
This will totally work since we have an unlimited amount of rare earth elements we can just ship off into space never to see again. Infinite raw materials + infinite power equals infinite AI!!!
Accountants love this
The financial system is already freaking out about depreciation on land based data centers. I don't think it could survive what you're talking about.
Being under the ocean in a metal box you don't get too many micro-meteors or cosmic rays though.
How do you make a small fortune? Start with a big one.
The thing being called obvious here is that the maintenance you have to do on earth is vastly cheaper than the overspeccing you need to do in space (otherwise we would overspec on earth). That's before even considering the harsh radiation environment and the incredible cost to put even a single pound into low earth orbit.