logoalt Hacker News

PunchyHamsteryesterday at 11:10 PM2 repliesview on HN

Yeah but how's that more financially viable than "build your own solar battery farm to power data center on ground"


Replies

hkpacktoday at 12:02 AM

Land is expensive, water is scarce, people don’t want sound pollution anywhere near them.

Building a datacenter in the neighborhood is already unpopular enough that companies do tricks to prevent public from knowing what is being built and by whom in advance.

Sending a small box with a panel to space may be a solution if a: the inside of the box is expensive and the cost to launch is cheap.

You amortize the box over 2-5 years and burn it in the atmosphere afterwards.

If the math is mathing, multiply by a million and voila, you have a datacenter in space where each rack is flying separately.

With a regular compute it may not be profitable but with GPUs connected to each other by optical links? I think it may be possible.

show 1 reply
dzhiurgistoday at 12:56 AM

Solar capacity factor is 10-20%. So your state of the art chips are utilized 10-20%. That just makes no sense. Adding batteries help, but does not solve it entirely.