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chris_money202today at 7:27 PM3 repliesview on HN

Repairability and depreciation are the main problems. A earth data center can be repaired, depreciated, and recycled at EoL recovering some of the costs. SpaceX datacenters are a total write off from the moment they are launched.


Replies

jacobgoldtoday at 7:35 PM

That's actually not a concern I'd have, because hardware that has been sufficiently tested and burned in tends not to fail for a very long time.

I've done builds that ran for 5+ years with virtually no physical attention, just continual degradation as hardware is taken out of service. There's also not much money to recover from 5+ year-old hardware.

I used to run AI inference GPU servers in road vehicles, which is probably an even harsher environment than a single rocket launch, and the vibration problems are real but solvable.

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vlovich123today at 8:07 PM

The Microsoft design of filling an airtight submersible structure with argon and dropping it to the bottom of the ocean floor is the alternative design - you’re not looking to do repairs but amortize the low cost of failures across the value you extract.

The biggest issue with space is not repairability but heat - when you’re in a vacuum the only way to disperse heat is through black body radiation and that’s horribly slow compared with normal mechanisms. It means you need giant physical structures whose sole job is to accept heat from the processing core and radiate it away and have so much more material that you can radiate it at the speed you generate. It’s a huge unsolved physics problem which is why everyone is skeptical.

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tqitoday at 8:18 PM

Isn't the problem also that because of radiation, processors in space either need to have larger feature sizes OR additional shielding / redundancy? Seems like a pretty high price to pay for slightly cheaper energy...

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