alt Hacker NewsAre there any reasonable analyses of the practicality of data centers in space?
I know Dwarkesh Patel was interviewing Elon and brought up the fact that power cost for data centers is only 20%. The number I could find is 7-18%? GPUs are the majority of the cost. I don't think Elon responded directly to that.
There's the argument that licensing to build these things is cheaper in space. But earth has a lot of space in the middle of nowhere that no one would object to. That seems cheaper than space.
And the heat dissipation argument against it seems like a good one but I don't know if it's actually just a small engineering problem that can be solved cheaply or more fundamental.
On the plus side, you could say there is better connectivity in orbit. But if you're running inference, you'd probably want to talk to the same server that has your context cached. As it whips around earth, your latency would vary a lot, right?
I'd love it if someone could point me to a better analysis. It's an interesting question in general. Not just because one of the highest valued companies in the world is based entirely on its feasibility.
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when the billionaires trigger a nuke fest, I assume they want their AI overload safe.
This has been done on HN a few times. The heat dissipation argument is a solved problem with known physics, it's just that pointing out the inefficiency of radiative cooling is the correct response to the daft claim that "space is cold" (the solution is "launch lots of additional mass into space every 5 years" which isn't exactly cheap). Though that claim is still better than Elon trying to tell idiots that SpaceX's ODCs are "much simpler than a Starlink satellite"...
Good coverage of the relevant problems are here https://peraspera.us/realities-of-space-based-compute/
Perhaps an understated one is chip obsolence. With a terrestrial datacentre you replace chips when they're uneconomical due to how much faster alternatives are or when they reach end of life; with an orbital datacentre you replace them on fixed cycles depending on how much propellant you launched with.
But nobody doubts you can build them, it's just hard to imagine a scenario in which a terrestrial equivalent isn't cheaper, more flexible and more reliable. Actual good reasons for adding compute capacity in space are, ironically, the latency: for some edge cases like autonomous control systems that matters more than the attractive unit economics of sticking computers in a building.
Still, the economic case for ODCs [eventually] is more compelling than the case for the value of that revenue stream to SpaceX exceeding current US GDP in the not too distant future...