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To say the quiet part out loud, I don't think any serious companies have any intention to build a data center in space. There is no benefit in actually trying t

To say the quiet part out loud, I don't think any serious companies have any intention to build a data center in space. There is no benefit in actually trying this. There is however, benefit in saying you'll do it to advance a narrative and distract from the problems terrestrial data centers are facing to an audience that mostly doesn't understand how heat transfer in a vacuum works.

mangecoeur 10mo ago
Many of the dumb ideas being hyped in this AI bubble make sense viewed through this lens. Data centres stirring up opposition? Sell a sci-fi vision that you will move them to Space! And reassure your over-extended investors that the data centre buildout rush you’re committing to isn’t going to get bogged down in protests and lawsuits. The people hyping this stuff are not stupid, just their real goal (make as much money as possible as quickly as possible) has only a vague relationship to what they claim to be doing.
- smcin 10mo ago
  If Arthur C Clarke was still alive, he would be much in demand as sci-fi frontperson for these.
  - DamonHD 10mo ago
    I think that he had more sense...
- rsynnott 10mo ago
  At the point, it's beginning to feel a bit like the 419 scam (where you make the details deliberately absurd so as to ward off people inclined to be sceptical early, leaving you with only the easiest marks.) SMRs! Data centres in space! "phD level AIs".
  - eru 10mo ago
    You can short the publicly traded companies that do this.
    - rsynnott 10mo ago
      The market can, as always, remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, or certainly for longer than _I_ can. Like, come on, you must understand what a stupid response this is? “There is a bubble” is not a sufficient thesis to, well, do much of anything on.
      - datavirtue 10mo ago
        Really? Logic wouldn't dictate that if I'm up 300% or more over two years and everyone is starting to get jittery about an AI bubble that perhaps I should pull out now and await the pullback? If it happens in a year, and I can buy back in at a 15-20% discount, that is also a return!! Do you hold for possibly another 5%? That doesn't make any sense. Your cash gets 4% a year just waiting--paid monthly.
        Earw0rm 10mo ago
        Yep, taking your winnings if you're up 300% isn't a bad idea, but timing things right on a short is much harder.
        rsynnott 10mo ago
        Yeah, that you could do, though even then if the timing is sufficiently uncertain you might be in trouble, and it's particularly risky in a time of stubbornly higher-than-ideal inflation. If you happened to have a bunch of Hype-y AI Ltd, then sure, probably. Far less clearly a good idea if you just have the S&P500, though. It's further complicated by the fact that most of the worst examples of AI hype are not public. Like, if and when the bubble bursts, the hyperscalers will likely get burned, but they're not going to go to zero or anywhere near it. And that's assuming you already have stocks; it's very different, risk-wise, from shorting or buying puts. > Your cash gets 4% a year just waiting--paid monthly. It really doesn't, due to inflation.
Ekaros 10mo ago
It can be considered as advertising. Like Coca-Cola. Not actually anything new or real most of the time. But keeping the mind-share. Making the company seem like they are on cutting-edge, visionary and futuristic. After all the scam is build on future promises. And not the current day real profits.
- TheOtherHobbes 10mo ago
  Classic misaligned incentives - pretendgineering is far more profitable than building stuff that works reliably and is useful. We've moved past bullshit jobs to a bullshit economy, which operates by moving money from investors to billionaires and back again, driven by pitch deck thoughts and prayers and implied threats. ("Bail us out or everyone dies.")
thelastgallon 10mo ago
> There is however, benefit in saying you'll do it to advance a narrative Its almost as if there is good money to be made promoting bad ideas! Theranos, Wework, Tesla, NFTs, Crypto.
mr_toad 10mo ago
The only real advantage is 24/7 power without having to use batteries (or some other power supply at night or when cloudy). The way solar prices are going the problem of suppling power when the sun isn’t visible is a real bottleneck.
- yoz-y 10mo ago
  Is there an orbit which has 24/7 sun and a visibility to same location?
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - wcoenen 10mo ago
    Geosynchronous orbits do not pass through the Earth's shadow as much as you might think. These orbits sit in the same plane as the equator, which is tilted 23.5 degrees when compared to a line from the sun to the earth. They still pass through the earth's shadow in the weeks around the equinoxes though. Worst case is about 70 minutes of shadow. That said, it seems more likely to me that there is no requirement to stay over the same spot on the earth, and a lower altitude sun-synchronous orbit would be used.
- newsclues 10mo ago
  The real advantage is latency but who really needs that? The military may have some use cases (think remote control of drones and the link between the controllers and satellites) but the use cases are limited
  - jhgb 10mo ago
    There's one obvious potential application, which is caching of common requests. If something like segments of streams or any CDN contents is cached on the satellite, it reduces communication to a single hop for a large portion of traffic (IIRC, 70% or so?). Storage is very lightweight these days and failure to read cached data is not critical, so putting lots of SSDs on a LEO constellation satellite seems like a no-brainer to me if you're trying to optimize bandwidth usage.
vid 10mo ago
I always assume, unfortunately, that once companies start to get to a certain point they become strategic, and military applications comes into play. They then probably get special consideration when it comes to funding and access. All of Musk's efforts certainly fit this paradigm.
- Zigurd 10mo ago
  Google "atoms for peace." You will find an entire multidimensional cluster of hype ranging from Rickover maneuvering to get a nuclear navy, which seems to work pretty well, but on the way there it created a subsidized nuclear reactor business which was never in the money but for subsidies, loss leaders, and underbids. There was no Golden Age of nuclear power. There were fixed bid contracts that masked cost overruns until they didn't anymore. There was FOMO about Soviet gigantism and (subsidized) European nuclear projects.
amanaplanacanal 10mo ago
Much like oil companies crowing about their carbon capture or oil from algae projects.
JJMcJ 10mo ago
Consider what it costs to lift material to orbit. How can it possibly make sense except as a science fair project?
- mercutio2 10mo ago
  You mean, not very much? Everything about space-based anything is dependent in the short to medium term on Starship making mass to LEO cost about as much as air freight. Starship, at least as a rapidly reusable second stage, may fail, rockets are hard. But you aren’t really engaging with people’s dreams if you start from “we don’t have access to the technologies that appear to represent a one to two order of magnitude cost shift”.
exomonk 10mo ago
Space datacenters have the dual-use of tracking and weapons targeting which is needed for a robust Golden Dome architecture (immune to comm link jamming, terabit image sensor processing) Musk is involved in every aspect of Golden Dome.
- bigyabai 10mo ago
  > Space datacenters have the dual-use of tracking and weapons targeting Space datacenters aren't going to be equipped with military infrared sensors. They stick out like a sore thumb on the electromagnetic spectrum and the second you test it every peer-power would know it's a military platform. Nevermind the fact that the satellites don't transmit to American C2, so they'd need laggy ad-hoc networking to reach STRATCOM over on Link 16. > Musk is involved in every aspect of Golden Dome. SpaceX is the only firm on the planet produces a booster stack with the throw weight to put a usable kinetic weapon in orbit. It's not their first military contract, Musk has been sticking his nose in the NRO projects for years now. Are you the user forgot-im-old? Your stylometry (and obsession with Musk/SDI) is pretty familiar. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=forgot-im-old https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=forgot-im-old
  - exomonk 10mo ago
    Not sure what you're trying to say If you're interested in Musk and the Mars Society history as a front for the U.S. military industrial complex, a good start is https://www.mintpressnews.com/pentagon-recruiting-elon-musk-nuclear-war/289055/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/pentagon-recruiting-elon-musk-... And that was written before Musk won the recent Golden Dome contracts, etc.. so very precient
    - bigyabai 10mo ago
      You're talking past everything I said. Do you have any sources for your claim that space based datacenters are dual-use?
      - exomonk 10mo ago
wheels 10mo ago
This was my thought the first time I heard these talked about on a podcast where it talked about there being infinite cooling ... and I just kind of face-palmed because it was like, "This is being discussed by people who don't know things about space." We already have places on earth with effectively unlimited solar power and effectively unlimited cooling (though not the same places) but without having to launch stuff into space.
mybestday 10mo ago
It makes the same amount of sense as a colony on Mars, largely for the same reasons. Sure you can put people underground, but that’s probably not much fun. Why not just do that on earth?
- ndsipa_pomu 10mo ago
  Is the answer slavery? Once you've been taken to Mars and given your underground living quarters, you're going to be stuck there and not have any option but to carry on working or be thrown out to die on the surface.
- exomonk 10mo ago
  It's basically nuclear preparedness research. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_system) https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...
- wombatpm 10mo ago
  They should be doing that somewhere inhospitable to prove out the technology and concept. Set up in the arctic and work only with loads of materials that correspond to a starship load. But then again no one is really serious about Mars.
myhf 10mo ago
To say the even quieter part out loud, datacenters are colonial encampments (like energy projects). Space has no indigenous people to colonize.
- titanomachy 10mo ago
  Ok, but couldn’t you equally say that about anything constructed by industrialized people in places that used to have lots of non-industrialized people?
  - cess11 10mo ago
    Yes. Industrialisation and its aftermath has been quite gruesome for a very long time.
more_corn 10mo ago
Elon is 100% planning to put significant ai compute in space. He is probably planning to do it in a decentralized way. He has the launch platform (spacex), he has the existing power and data infrastructure (starlink), he has the demand side. (Xai) Will he succeed? That is different question. Is it possible to add enough power generation and thermal radiative capacity to starlink nodes to bother? Don’t know, but an analysis that fails to answer those two specific engineering questions is useless.

mangecoeur 10mo ago

Many of the dumb ideas being hyped in this AI bubble make sense viewed through this lens. Data centres stirring up opposition? Sell a sci-fi vision that you will move them to Space! And reassure your over-extended investors that the data centre buildout rush you’re committing to isn’t going to get bogged down in protests and lawsuits. The people hyping this stuff are not stupid, just their real goal (make as much money as possible as quickly as possible) has only a vague relationship to what they claim to be doing.

smcin 10mo ago
If Arthur C Clarke was still alive, he would be much in demand as sci-fi frontperson for these.
- DamonHD 10mo ago
  I think that he had more sense...
rsynnott 10mo ago
At the point, it's beginning to feel a bit like the 419 scam (where you make the details deliberately absurd so as to ward off people inclined to be sceptical early, leaving you with only the easiest marks.) SMRs! Data centres in space! "phD level AIs".
- eru 10mo ago
  You can short the publicly traded companies that do this.
  - rsynnott 10mo ago
    The market can, as always, remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, or certainly for longer than _I_ can. Like, come on, you must understand what a stupid response this is? “There is a bubble” is not a sufficient thesis to, well, do much of anything on.
    - datavirtue 10mo ago
      Really? Logic wouldn't dictate that if I'm up 300% or more over two years and everyone is starting to get jittery about an AI bubble that perhaps I should pull out now and await the pullback? If it happens in a year, and I can buy back in at a 15-20% discount, that is also a return!! Do you hold for possibly another 5%? That doesn't make any sense. Your cash gets 4% a year just waiting--paid monthly.
      - Earw0rm 10mo ago
        Yep, taking your winnings if you're up 300% isn't a bad idea, but timing things right on a short is much harder.
      - rsynnott 10mo ago
        Yeah, that you could do, though even then if the timing is sufficiently uncertain you might be in trouble, and it's particularly risky in a time of stubbornly higher-than-ideal inflation. If you happened to have a bunch of Hype-y AI Ltd, then sure, probably. Far less clearly a good idea if you just have the S&P500, though. It's further complicated by the fact that most of the worst examples of AI hype are not public. Like, if and when the bubble bursts, the hyperscalers will likely get burned, but they're not going to go to zero or anywhere near it. And that's assuming you already have stocks; it's very different, risk-wise, from shorting or buying puts. > Your cash gets 4% a year just waiting--paid monthly. It really doesn't, due to inflation.

Ekaros 10mo ago

It can be considered as advertising. Like Coca-Cola. Not actually anything new or real most of the time. But keeping the mind-share. Making the company seem like they are on cutting-edge, visionary and futuristic. After all the scam is build on future promises. And not the current day real profits.

TheOtherHobbes 10mo ago
Classic misaligned incentives - pretendgineering is far more profitable than building stuff that works reliably and is useful. We've moved past bullshit jobs to a bullshit economy, which operates by moving money from investors to billionaires and back again, driven by pitch deck thoughts and prayers and implied threats. ("Bail us out or everyone dies.")

thelastgallon 10mo ago

> There is however, benefit in saying you'll do it to advance a narrative Its almost as if there is good money to be made promoting bad ideas! Theranos, Wework, Tesla, NFTs, Crypto.

mr_toad 10mo ago

The only real advantage is 24/7 power without having to use batteries (or some other power supply at night or when cloudy). The way solar prices are going the problem of suppling power when the sun isn’t visible is a real bottleneck.

yoz-y 10mo ago
Is there an orbit which has 24/7 sun and a visibility to same location?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- wcoenen 10mo ago
  Geosynchronous orbits do not pass through the Earth's shadow as much as you might think. These orbits sit in the same plane as the equator, which is tilted 23.5 degrees when compared to a line from the sun to the earth. They still pass through the earth's shadow in the weeks around the equinoxes though. Worst case is about 70 minutes of shadow. That said, it seems more likely to me that there is no requirement to stay over the same spot on the earth, and a lower altitude sun-synchronous orbit would be used.
newsclues 10mo ago
The real advantage is latency but who really needs that? The military may have some use cases (think remote control of drones and the link between the controllers and satellites) but the use cases are limited
- jhgb 10mo ago
  There's one obvious potential application, which is caching of common requests. If something like segments of streams or any CDN contents is cached on the satellite, it reduces communication to a single hop for a large portion of traffic (IIRC, 70% or so?). Storage is very lightweight these days and failure to read cached data is not critical, so putting lots of SSDs on a LEO constellation satellite seems like a no-brainer to me if you're trying to optimize bandwidth usage.

vid 10mo ago

I always assume, unfortunately, that once companies start to get to a certain point they become strategic, and military applications comes into play. They then probably get special consideration when it comes to funding and access. All of Musk's efforts certainly fit this paradigm.

Zigurd 10mo ago
Google "atoms for peace." You will find an entire multidimensional cluster of hype ranging from Rickover maneuvering to get a nuclear navy, which seems to work pretty well, but on the way there it created a subsidized nuclear reactor business which was never in the money but for subsidies, loss leaders, and underbids. There was no Golden Age of nuclear power. There were fixed bid contracts that masked cost overruns until they didn't anymore. There was FOMO about Soviet gigantism and (subsidized) European nuclear projects.

amanaplanacanal 10mo ago

Much like oil companies crowing about their carbon capture or oil from algae projects.

JJMcJ 10mo ago

Consider what it costs to lift material to orbit. How can it possibly make sense except as a science fair project?

mercutio2 10mo ago
You mean, not very much? Everything about space-based anything is dependent in the short to medium term on Starship making mass to LEO cost about as much as air freight. Starship, at least as a rapidly reusable second stage, may fail, rockets are hard. But you aren’t really engaging with people’s dreams if you start from “we don’t have access to the technologies that appear to represent a one to two order of magnitude cost shift”.

exomonk 10mo ago

Space datacenters have the dual-use of tracking and weapons targeting which is needed for a robust Golden Dome architecture (immune to comm link jamming, terabit image sensor processing) Musk is involved in every aspect of Golden Dome.

bigyabai 10mo ago
> Space datacenters have the dual-use of tracking and weapons targeting Space datacenters aren't going to be equipped with military infrared sensors. They stick out like a sore thumb on the electromagnetic spectrum and the second you test it every peer-power would know it's a military platform. Nevermind the fact that the satellites don't transmit to American C2, so they'd need laggy ad-hoc networking to reach STRATCOM over on Link 16. > Musk is involved in every aspect of Golden Dome. SpaceX is the only firm on the planet produces a booster stack with the throw weight to put a usable kinetic weapon in orbit. It's not their first military contract, Musk has been sticking his nose in the NRO projects for years now. Are you the user forgot-im-old? Your stylometry (and obsession with Musk/SDI) is pretty familiar. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=forgot-im-old https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=forgot-im-old
- exomonk 10mo ago
  Not sure what you're trying to say If you're interested in Musk and the Mars Society history as a front for the U.S. military industrial complex, a good start is https://www.mintpressnews.com/pentagon-recruiting-elon-musk-nuclear-war/289055/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/pentagon-recruiting-elon-musk-... And that was written before Musk won the recent Golden Dome contracts, etc.. so very precient
  - bigyabai 10mo ago
    You're talking past everything I said. Do you have any sources for your claim that space based datacenters are dual-use?
    - exomonk 10mo ago

wheels 10mo ago

This was my thought the first time I heard these talked about on a podcast where it talked about there being infinite cooling ... and I just kind of face-palmed because it was like, "This is being discussed by people who don't know things about space." We already have places on earth with effectively unlimited solar power and effectively unlimited cooling (though not the same places) but without having to launch stuff into space.

mybestday 10mo ago

It makes the same amount of sense as a colony on Mars, largely for the same reasons. Sure you can put people underground, but that’s probably not much fun. Why not just do that on earth?

ndsipa_pomu 10mo ago
Is the answer slavery? Once you've been taken to Mars and given your underground living quarters, you're going to be stuck there and not have any option but to carry on working or be thrown out to die on the surface.
exomonk 10mo ago
It's basically nuclear preparedness research. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_system) https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...
wombatpm 10mo ago
They should be doing that somewhere inhospitable to prove out the technology and concept. Set up in the arctic and work only with loads of materials that correspond to a starship load. But then again no one is really serious about Mars.

myhf 10mo ago

To say the even quieter part out loud, datacenters are colonial encampments (like energy projects). Space has no indigenous people to colonize.

titanomachy 10mo ago
Ok, but couldn’t you equally say that about anything constructed by industrialized people in places that used to have lots of non-industrialized people?
- cess11 10mo ago
  Yes. Industrialisation and its aftermath has been quite gruesome for a very long time.

more_corn 10mo ago

Elon is 100% planning to put significant ai compute in space. He is probably planning to do it in a decentralized way. He has the launch platform (spacex), he has the existing power and data infrastructure (starlink), he has the demand side. (Xai) Will he succeed? That is different question. Is it possible to add enough power generation and thermal radiative capacity to starlink nodes to bother? Don’t know, but an analysis that fails to answer those two specific engineering questions is useless.