alt Hacker NewsNo we will not. The reason is simple: Space is not in the cloud, it is above. Anything that's not in the cloud is bad.
Silliness aside, has anyone come up with a cooling system that would work well for a friggin data center in space? Or is it still all just a wishful thinking game, ignoring physics?
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> Silliness aside, has anyone come up with a cooling system that would work well for a friggin data center in space? Or is it still all just a wishful thinking game, ignoring physics
That cooling is already perfectly viable.
However at the temperatures chips operate at, because stuff on the ground is getting convective cooling as well as radiative, a radiator designed for LEO will reject slightly more heat on the ground than it would in orbit.
It is absolutely a wishful thinking game, ignoring physics. It's a bet made by investors who don't know or care about the science, and are looking for a modal outcome of a failed company purchased by SpaceX or by an even dumber company looking to compete with SpaceX.
it's the equivalent of PMs asking "can we just make our own llm to save costs"
The plan as I understand it is to pack it tightly with TPUs with liquid cooling out to radiators and flying a tight cluster of these next to each other using high bandwidth laser links. That lets you balance the amount of thermal radiation you need to emit vs the amount of TPUs in a single satellite. Thus it’s not a DC in a single satellite but more like a rack and then a bundle of racks flying beside each other.