alt Hacker NewsThey will have moat in the satellite launching business, which is not useful in the AI datacenter market.
You can put AI chips in datacenters in the desert for far less than $100/kg. With lots of solar power available, the option to easily access your hardware and far less radiation issues.
The datacenter in space story really only exists to make it possible for Musk to sell X to SpaceX and make more money from the IPO. That's all. There is no engineering reason.
Replies
It's not an engineering bet.
Musk's bet is dysfunctional politics will make it impossible to build enough data centres and the energy needed to power them. There are many, many reasons that might be wrong. However, if the economics are even close to viable, they could start throwing up data centres quicker than anyone can build them terrestrially (at least in the democratic west).
> You can put AI chips in datacenters in the desert for far less than $100/kg
if you can't put them outside of Amarillo Texas without people throwing a fit then you can't put them anywhere. I mean freaking Pantex is there ffs!
Yours is the only valid argument. If space datacenters are not competitive with terrestrial (in terms of megatokens/$ or whatever), then they will never work and SpaceX will fail. That's the whole ball game.
But anyone who thinks they can predict those prices in ten years is wildly overconfident.