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I've been saying for a long time that we should consider remote areas for building datacenters for batch processing. At first I thought the poles (of the plane

I've been saying for a long time that we should consider remote areas for building datacenters for batch processing. At first I thought the poles (of the planet) might be good. The cooling is basically free. But the energy and internet connectivity would be a problem. At the poles you can really only get solar about three months a year, and even then you need a lot of panels. Most of Antarctica is powered diesel because of this. So the next thought was space. At the time, launching to space was way too costly for it to ever make sense. But now, with much cheaper launches, space is accessible. Power seems easily solved. You can get lots of free energy from the sun with some modest panels. But to do that requires an odd orbit where you wouldn't be over the same spot on earth, which could make internet access difficult. Or you can go geostationary over a powerful ground station, but then you'd need some really big batteries for all the time you aren't in the sun. But cooling is a huge problem. Space is cold, but there is no medium to transfer the heat away from the hot objects. I think this will be the biggest sticking point, unless they came up with an innovative solution.

pauletienney 1y ago
I have no clue about space technology but many comments point the difficulty to cool anything in space. If Starcloud had an innovative solution to this problem, why on Earth (sic) focus on data centers when they could help the entire space industry? It does not smell good.
vonneumannstan 1y ago
>But cooling is a huge problem. Space is cold, but there is no medium to transfer the heat away from the hot objects. I think this will be the biggest sticking point, unless they came up with an innovative solution. Their main tech breakthrough would have to be in this area otherwise the company is worthless imo.
- daeken 1y ago
  It's possible to do all of this with current technology. Just... Why? The cost would be exorbitant; even with really clever deployment tech, the launch costs are gonna be dominated by solar panels and radiators. This is a super cool idea and seems like perfect investor-bait. That's about where it ends.
  - handfuloflight 1y ago
    Perhaps a hedge in case apocalyptic scenarios disable or reduce networks on the ground?
    - jsheard 1y ago
      Apocalyptic scenarios where terrestrial communication methods going back over a century are no longer feasible, but we can still readily talk to space? And maintain/replace the stuff we have up there?
      - handfuloflight 1y ago
        Like the commenter, your error is thinking the hedge is for you. And what's more—you're assuming the scenario must be total destruction, there's a gradation of disruption where this hedge remains feasible and even vital.
        handfuloflight 1y ago
        Like [the other commenter]*
    - arp242 1y ago
      Yes, because in an apocalyptic scenario what we all will be clamouring will be space data centres training AI and mining bitcoin.
      - handfuloflight 1y ago
        We? Did you think they're hedging so you could use it?
  - matt-p 1y ago
    Genuinely most "AI" DCs are spending less than 9KW on cooling for every 100KW of servers. If you were that bothered about getting that to zero, you could literally sink them into the ocean, build a heat network so the town can take the heat for free or use any of a dozen more established and practical ways to do that.
- thrance 1y ago
  I don't think they can bend the laws of physics though. Vacuum means the only way to dissipate heat is through thermal radiation, hence the huge infrared radiators.
vasco 1y ago
> But to do that requires an odd orbit where you wouldn't be over the same spot on earth, which could make internet access difficult Routing through starlink should have direct LoS at all times.
- jsheard 1y ago
  Whether Starlink can keep up with the bandwidth demands of orbital datacenters is another question though. (probably not)
  - vasco 1y ago
    I'd imagine the bandwidth limitations are physical and similar for Starlink or other satellites either now or very soon. I was replying to the LoS concerns, I agree overall this doesn't work, but I don't think it's because of LoS problems.
dfabulich 1y ago
Their whitepaper explains their cooling "solution": https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf > As conduction and convection to the environment are not available in space, this means the data center will require radiators capable of radiatively dissipating gigawatts of thermal load. To achieve this, Starcloud is developing a lightweight deployable radiator design with a very large area - by far the largest radiators deployed in space - radiating primarily towards deep space... They claim they can radiate "633.08 W / m^2". At that rate, they're looking at square kilometers of radiators to dissipate gigawatts of thermal load, perhaps hectares of radiators. They also claim that they can "dramatically increase" heat dissipation with heat pumps. So, there you have it: "all you have to do" is deploy a few hectares of radiators in space, combined with heat pumps that can dissipate gigawatts of thermal load with no maintenance at all over a lifetime of decades. This seems like the sort of "not technically impossible" problem that can attract a large amount of VC funding, as VCs buy lottery tickets that the problem can be solved.
- mrj 1y ago
  An object of that size in orbit seems like it'd run into problems developing sizable holes due to space junk and whathaveyou. There's probably some maintenance...
- Invictus0 1y ago
  I don't get it--are the founders just grifters? How did this startup even make it off the drawing board?
  - foobiekr 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - dang 1y ago
      That crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed on HN, so please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dijit 1y ago
> I've been saying for a long time that we should consider remote areas for building datacenters for batch processing. FWIW there's a reason that Sweden has a bunch of datacenters in the north that are peanuts compared to hosting in Virginia. They're "poorly" connected (by virtue of being a bit out of the way), but the free cooling and power from renewables make them extremely attractive. There was a time where they were the favourite of crypto-miners for the same reason as they would be attractive to AI training farms. Fortlax has some I believe; https://www.fortlax.se https://www.fortlax.se ----- As for the meat of the paper. Anyone with a passing understanding of space will be quick to point out that: A) Heat is a problem in space, it's either way-way-way to hot (IE; you're in the path of the Sun) or it's way-way-way too cold (IE; you're out of the sun) and the shift between the two means you need to build for both. You also can't dissipate heat as there's no air to take the heat away. B) Power is not so abundant and solar panels degrade; a huge amount of satellite building is essentially managing a decline in the capability of hardware. That's part of why there are so many up there. C) Getting reasonably sized hardware up there is beyond improbable, though I'll grant you that most of the weight in a computer is the cooling components and chassis. D) Cosmic Rays. No electromagnetic barrier from earth and extremely tight lithographies. I mean... there's a reason NASA is still using CPU's measured in the megahertz range.
- dzhiurgis 1y ago
  > D) Cosmic Rays. AFAIK someone (Mars Ingenuity helicopter team) discovered that some chips handle them much better than others, so they just test a bunch and keep resistant ones.
ziofill 1y ago
Perhaps I'm missing something, but if the only energy they get is coming from the sun, then they only need to dissipate that same amount of heat (minus whatever energy was needed for beaming data down to Earth).
- bongodongobob 1y ago
  What you're missing is that you'd have a huge solar array that powers something much smaller, so that energy gets concentrated into a small area.
  - gbear605 1y ago
    That’s not how it works. With conservation of energy, all the energy coming in to power the computers has to be emitted somehow. Powering computers doesn’t get rid of the energy, it just makes it unusable and converts it into heat.
    - apitman 1y ago
      This is probably a stupid question but is it possible to recycle the heat back into electricity and use it again?
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - ziofill 1y ago
        In principle heat can be converted to work if there are two bodies at different temperature. In space heat can only be irradiated away since there’s no matter available for conduction, so I would think that eventually all of your machinery would thermalize with the environment and the boundary conditions. While there should be a temperature gradient between the side exposed to the sun and the one opposite to it, I’m not sure how much of this is actually harvestable.
    - galaxyLogic 1y ago
38 1y ago
> At first I thought the poles (of the planet) might be good. The cooling is basically free. Yes, let's go ahead and finish melting the ice caps, great idea
nashashmi 1y ago
Microsoft has tried underwater data centers
perihelions 1y ago
- "But to do that requires an odd orbit where you wouldn't be over the same spot on earth, which could make internet access difficult". Surely you'd want to use satellite constellations as relays? There's thousands of those satellites in line-of-sight all the time. It's strictly superior on pure geometry anyway (I think). You have a finite channel capacity between your satellite and your ground station; but different satellites, in non-overlapping microwave spots, are in separate spatial channels.
dzhiurgis 1y ago
Integrate compute units + Starlink into solar panels so people can buy them to earn money/tokens. Much cheaper than tangling massive power lines around the planet.
fitzn 1y ago
Regarding Internet connectivity regardless of the orbit or location, something like YC co Bifrost Orbital (https://bifrostorbital.com/ https://bifrostorbital.com/), might be an option.
dekhn 1y ago
Cooling at the south pole is not free- it's actually hard work to keep data centers cool at the pole. My friend helped run the IceCube data center at the station and got to fly down and stay there for a week, basically to insert debian CDs and press buttons.
monkeycantype 1y ago
I vote we aim the heat dishes at passing comets to steer them into moon to give it temporary oceans and atmosphere.
tzs 1y ago
> Or you can go geostationary over a powerful ground station, but then you'd need some really big batteries for all the time you aren't in the sun. Geostationary satellites only go into Earth's shadow on around 20 days on each side of an equinox. That leave 280+ days each year where they are in sun all day. Maybe that's enough to be worth it? Or if you do need to keep the things working even on those ~80 days a year when they do spend part of the day in shadow maybe they could be powered by energy beamed in from those not in shadow? You'd put a bunch in geostationary orbits spread out evenly so that each is close enough to its neighbors for power beaming. I wonder if something crazy might work? Could you actually connect adjacent satellites by an actual physical power cable, which would also be in geostationary orbit? I'd guess you'd actually need two conductors in your cable, carrying current in opposite direction to cancel out interactions with Earth's magnetic field so the system doesn't get pushed out of its orbit (which would probably be bad). There would probably be gravitational interactions like with the Moon that might also make it hard to keep everything in place, but maybe by purposefully sending different currents in opposite directions on some of the links you could purposefully use interactions with the Earth's magnetic field to move the cable back where you wanted? If the satellites are connected by cables then maybe they could actually be slightly higher than geostationary but moving faster than circular orbital speed at that altitude so there is a net outward force from that, which could be countered by tension in the power cables to force them into a circular path that is still geostationary.
xupybd 1y ago
Geostationary is too far out
- jedberg 1y ago
  Why? It's for batch jobs, latency doesn't matter.
  - xupybd 1y ago
    If that's the case then sure but it limits the use case.

pauletienney 1y ago

I have no clue about space technology but many comments point the difficulty to cool anything in space. If Starcloud had an innovative solution to this problem, why on Earth (sic) focus on data centers when they could help the entire space industry? It does not smell good.

vonneumannstan 1y ago

>But cooling is a huge problem. Space is cold, but there is no medium to transfer the heat away from the hot objects. I think this will be the biggest sticking point, unless they came up with an innovative solution. Their main tech breakthrough would have to be in this area otherwise the company is worthless imo.

daeken 1y ago
It's possible to do all of this with current technology. Just... Why? The cost would be exorbitant; even with really clever deployment tech, the launch costs are gonna be dominated by solar panels and radiators. This is a super cool idea and seems like perfect investor-bait. That's about where it ends.
- handfuloflight 1y ago
  Perhaps a hedge in case apocalyptic scenarios disable or reduce networks on the ground?
  - jsheard 1y ago
    Apocalyptic scenarios where terrestrial communication methods going back over a century are no longer feasible, but we can still readily talk to space? And maintain/replace the stuff we have up there?
    - handfuloflight 1y ago
      Like the commenter, your error is thinking the hedge is for you. And what's more—you're assuming the scenario must be total destruction, there's a gradation of disruption where this hedge remains feasible and even vital.
      - handfuloflight 1y ago
        Like [the other commenter]*
  - arp242 1y ago
    Yes, because in an apocalyptic scenario what we all will be clamouring will be space data centres training AI and mining bitcoin.
    - handfuloflight 1y ago
      We? Did you think they're hedging so you could use it?
- matt-p 1y ago
  Genuinely most "AI" DCs are spending less than 9KW on cooling for every 100KW of servers. If you were that bothered about getting that to zero, you could literally sink them into the ocean, build a heat network so the town can take the heat for free or use any of a dozen more established and practical ways to do that.
thrance 1y ago
I don't think they can bend the laws of physics though. Vacuum means the only way to dissipate heat is through thermal radiation, hence the huge infrared radiators.

vasco 1y ago

> But to do that requires an odd orbit where you wouldn't be over the same spot on earth, which could make internet access difficult Routing through starlink should have direct LoS at all times.

jsheard 1y ago
Whether Starlink can keep up with the bandwidth demands of orbital datacenters is another question though. (probably not)
- vasco 1y ago
  I'd imagine the bandwidth limitations are physical and similar for Starlink or other satellites either now or very soon. I was replying to the LoS concerns, I agree overall this doesn't work, but I don't think it's because of LoS problems.

dfabulich 1y ago

Their whitepaper explains their cooling "solution": https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf > As conduction and convection to the environment are not available in space, this means the data center will require radiators capable of radiatively dissipating gigawatts of thermal load. To achieve this, Starcloud is developing a lightweight deployable radiator design with a very large area - by far the largest radiators deployed in space - radiating primarily towards deep space... They claim they can radiate "633.08 W / m^2". At that rate, they're looking at square kilometers of radiators to dissipate gigawatts of thermal load, perhaps hectares of radiators. They also claim that they can "dramatically increase" heat dissipation with heat pumps. So, there you have it: "all you have to do" is deploy a few hectares of radiators in space, combined with heat pumps that can dissipate gigawatts of thermal load with no maintenance at all over a lifetime of decades. This seems like the sort of "not technically impossible" problem that can attract a large amount of VC funding, as VCs buy lottery tickets that the problem can be solved.

mrj 1y ago
An object of that size in orbit seems like it'd run into problems developing sizable holes due to space junk and whathaveyou. There's probably some maintenance...
Invictus0 1y ago
I don't get it--are the founders just grifters? How did this startup even make it off the drawing board?
- foobiekr 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 1y ago
    That crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed on HN, so please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dijit 1y ago

> I've been saying for a long time that we should consider remote areas for building datacenters for batch processing. FWIW there's a reason that Sweden has a bunch of datacenters in the north that are peanuts compared to hosting in Virginia. They're "poorly" connected (by virtue of being a bit out of the way), but the free cooling and power from renewables make them extremely attractive. There was a time where they were the favourite of crypto-miners for the same reason as they would be attractive to AI training farms. Fortlax has some I believe; https://www.fortlax.se https://www.fortlax.se ----- As for the meat of the paper. Anyone with a passing understanding of space will be quick to point out that: A) Heat is a problem in space, it's either way-way-way to hot (IE; you're in the path of the Sun) or it's way-way-way too cold (IE; you're out of the sun) and the shift between the two means you need to build for both. You also can't dissipate heat as there's no air to take the heat away. B) Power is not so abundant and solar panels degrade; a huge amount of satellite building is essentially managing a decline in the capability of hardware. That's part of why there are so many up there. C) Getting reasonably sized hardware up there is beyond improbable, though I'll grant you that most of the weight in a computer is the cooling components and chassis. D) Cosmic Rays. No electromagnetic barrier from earth and extremely tight lithographies. I mean... there's a reason NASA is still using CPU's measured in the megahertz range.

dzhiurgis 1y ago
> D) Cosmic Rays. AFAIK someone (Mars Ingenuity helicopter team) discovered that some chips handle them much better than others, so they just test a bunch and keep resistant ones.

ziofill 1y ago

Perhaps I'm missing something, but if the only energy they get is coming from the sun, then they only need to dissipate that same amount of heat (minus whatever energy was needed for beaming data down to Earth).

bongodongobob 1y ago
What you're missing is that you'd have a huge solar array that powers something much smaller, so that energy gets concentrated into a small area.
- gbear605 1y ago
  That’s not how it works. With conservation of energy, all the energy coming in to power the computers has to be emitted somehow. Powering computers doesn’t get rid of the energy, it just makes it unusable and converts it into heat.
  - apitman 1y ago
    This is probably a stupid question but is it possible to recycle the heat back into electricity and use it again?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - ziofill 1y ago
      In principle heat can be converted to work if there are two bodies at different temperature. In space heat can only be irradiated away since there’s no matter available for conduction, so I would think that eventually all of your machinery would thermalize with the environment and the boundary conditions. While there should be a temperature gradient between the side exposed to the sun and the one opposite to it, I’m not sure how much of this is actually harvestable.
  - galaxyLogic 1y ago

38 1y ago

> At first I thought the poles (of the planet) might be good. The cooling is basically free. Yes, let's go ahead and finish melting the ice caps, great idea

nashashmi 1y ago

Microsoft has tried underwater data centers

perihelions 1y ago

- "But to do that requires an odd orbit where you wouldn't be over the same spot on earth, which could make internet access difficult". Surely you'd want to use satellite constellations as relays? There's thousands of those satellites in line-of-sight all the time. It's strictly superior on pure geometry anyway (I think). You have a finite channel capacity between your satellite and your ground station; but different satellites, in non-overlapping microwave spots, are in separate spatial channels.

dzhiurgis 1y ago

Integrate compute units + Starlink into solar panels so people can buy them to earn money/tokens. Much cheaper than tangling massive power lines around the planet.

fitzn 1y ago

Regarding Internet connectivity regardless of the orbit or location, something like YC co Bifrost Orbital (https://bifrostorbital.com/ https://bifrostorbital.com/), might be an option.

dekhn 1y ago

Cooling at the south pole is not free- it's actually hard work to keep data centers cool at the pole. My friend helped run the IceCube data center at the station and got to fly down and stay there for a week, basically to insert debian CDs and press buttons.

monkeycantype 1y ago

I vote we aim the heat dishes at passing comets to steer them into moon to give it temporary oceans and atmosphere.

tzs 1y ago

> Or you can go geostationary over a powerful ground station, but then you'd need some really big batteries for all the time you aren't in the sun. Geostationary satellites only go into Earth's shadow on around 20 days on each side of an equinox. That leave 280+ days each year where they are in sun all day. Maybe that's enough to be worth it? Or if you do need to keep the things working even on those ~80 days a year when they do spend part of the day in shadow maybe they could be powered by energy beamed in from those not in shadow? You'd put a bunch in geostationary orbits spread out evenly so that each is close enough to its neighbors for power beaming. I wonder if something crazy might work? Could you actually connect adjacent satellites by an actual physical power cable, which would also be in geostationary orbit? I'd guess you'd actually need two conductors in your cable, carrying current in opposite direction to cancel out interactions with Earth's magnetic field so the system doesn't get pushed out of its orbit (which would probably be bad). There would probably be gravitational interactions like with the Moon that might also make it hard to keep everything in place, but maybe by purposefully sending different currents in opposite directions on some of the links you could purposefully use interactions with the Earth's magnetic field to move the cable back where you wanted? If the satellites are connected by cables then maybe they could actually be slightly higher than geostationary but moving faster than circular orbital speed at that altitude so there is a net outward force from that, which could be countered by tension in the power cables to force them into a circular path that is still geostationary.

xupybd 1y ago

Geostationary is too far out

jedberg 1y ago
Why? It's for batch jobs, latency doesn't matter.
- xupybd 1y ago
  If that's the case then sure but it limits the use case.