alt Hacker NewsIf you think the primary source of electricity is solar (which clearly Musk does), then space increases the amount of compute per solar cell by ~5x, and eliminates the relatively large battery required for 24/7 operation. The thermal radiators and radiation effects are manageable.
The basic idea of putting compute in space to avoid inefficient power beaming goes back to NASA in the 60s, but the problem was always the high cost to orbit. Clearly Musk expects Starship will change that.
My dude, ISS has 200 KW of peak power.
NVIDIA H200 is 0.7 KW per chip.
To have 100K of GPUs you need 500 ISSs.
ISS cooling is 16KW dissipation. So like 16 H200. Now imagine you want to cool 100k instead of 16.
And all this before we talk about radiation, connectivity (good luck with 100gbps rack-to-rack we have on earth), and what have you.
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Sometimes I think all this space datacenters talk is just a PR to hush those sad folks that happen to live near the (future) datacenter: “don’t worry, it’s temporary”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/technology/ai-data-center...