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Footnote7341yesterday at 11:47 PM1 replyview on HN

The current bottleneck on compute is power and zoning. Solar panels are 5x more efficient in space, and there is no zoning in space.


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jsnelltoday at 12:57 AM

The current bottleneck is silicon. Every chip that is manufactured gets housed and powered. (It makes sense: the cost of compute is dominated by capex, the power costs are irrelevant, so they're ok paying a premium for power).

The space data center hypothesis relies on compute supply growing faster than power supply. (Both are bottlenecked on parts of the supply chain that will take ages to scale.)

Even if you believe that's the case, the point at which orbital data centers start making sense is incredibly sensitive to the exact growth rates.

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