alt Hacker NewsFWIW, given how many places in the U.S. are passing datacenter bans, I'd expect space-based datacenters to make a lot more sense over the coming years just because it'll be illegal to build them anywhere else.
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It’s still cheaper to build in a completely undeveloped desert with no neighbors and costly utility hookups than space. By orders of magnitude. That gap will never be materially close.
Space datacenters are just SDI2, a convenient bullshit to be able to funnel more money to campaign donors.
As long as there’s space on earth, Space Datacenters can never be economical. It’s rally that simple.
I don't support data center bans but even if that happens in the US I'm pretty sure some other countries will welcome them. For AI inference workloads the network latency doesn't matter.
If cities are banning datacenters, we can
a. put them a few miles outside urban centers
b. put them in space
Which is a cheaper, better option?
Nah, they'll just bite the bullet and build the data centers in remote Canada or Finland or somewhere else no one's complaining (ignore Greta as per usual) and tap into the local hydropower resources. Might take a tad longer and cost slightly more money than in [quasi-lawless US state], but other than that, no problem. Aluminium smelters (basically a solid form of electricity export) in Quebec and Siberia have been doing that for decades already (like 20GW private-ish hydropower).
You aren’t necessarily wrong but thats a dumb reason for space data centers to be good ideas.
You could probably see some of those bans reversed. You just need to have companies go into communities and act like they're a multi-trillion-dollar company instead of begging for tax abatements and shoving off the cost of the infrastructure on the people who feel like they might lose their jobs from AI.
I don't really understand this perspective. The margins for data centers are such that they could pay massive subsidies to state and local governments and put them in the middle of nowhere with BTM power, and almost all that opposition would evaporate overnight. And you'd still come out way ahead of space-based DCs. They're not doing this yet because they don't have to.
The world is a very, very large place and I have a hard time imagining space would be an easier place to do anything. Nobody wants to live near petrochemical factories or aluminum smelters, either, but we’ve got lots of petrochemicals and aluminum. SV execs shredded any chance of cheap public cooperation by presenting like cartoonishly evil, patronizing, greedy big corporate bad guys from some shitty legal dramedy. They need to learn from their mistakes, develop some humility, and approach people with a serious financial proposition, like the oil industry in Alaska. That’s not as cheap as it could have been if they didn’t start out acting like scaled-up shady local real estate developers trying to build condos on protected wetlands, but it will absolutely be a lot cheaper than space.