13 ms·

Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

• _jzlw 10mo ago
  [flagged]
• d_silin 10mo ago
  As an expert in this field, I can assure that cost is not the most important factor. Demand is.
  • ikiris 10mo ago
    Demand for what? A sealab like head in the sand view of lack of data regulation requirements?
    • d_silin 10mo ago
      specific software applications you can run in space that you can't run on Earth or can't run cheaper on Earth.
      • hooverd 10mo ago
        such as?
        • mlhpdx 10mo ago
          Unregulated casinos?
          • xgulfie 10mo ago
            Human trafficking ring?
          • compiler-guy 10mo ago
            Unregulated casinos don't need this kind of compute. Most could be run on a decent raspberry pi or two. At any rate, one basic communication's satellite worth of compute would be more than enough. No need for TPUs.
            • ViscountPenguin 10mo ago
              A cube-sat casino is an interesting concept for sure.
              • Figs 10mo ago
                Hmm. Has anyone ever flown a pirate radio blimp?
      • echoangle 10mo ago
        What’s software that would benefit from running in space? The only thing I can imagine is processing of data generated in space so you need less downlink or can reduce latency, everything else can be calculated wherever you want, no?
        • d_silin 10mo ago
          ...you have to pay me a lot for the answer to this question.
        • ikiris 10mo ago
          I think the point the original guy is hand wavingly getting at is the point of something like this is to avoid the possibility of say a FBI raid or Nuremburgish trials for a vast AI surveillance processing facility hub for other down looking satellites if they were to lose their newly acquired power, or similar technocratic ramblings / ideas like it would survive the end of society. Its like that scene at the end of Real Genius, "Maybe somebody already has a use for it, one for which it's perfectly designed." Lets look at the facts: Impossible to raid, not under any direct legal jurisdiction, high bandwidth line of sight communications options to satellite feed points that would be difficult to tap outside of other orbital actors, Power feed that is untethered to any planetary grid or at risk of terrestrial actors, etc.
          • echoangle 10mo ago
            That’s not how it works. Your state is responsible for your activities in space, so if you annoy other countries enough, your own country will regulate you. If they don’t, you could have just built the same thing on the ground in this country.
          • fch42 10mo ago
            Impossible to raid ? It's definitely much easier and much much cheaper to send a single rocket there blowing the assembled rather large target into still sizeable chucks of orbital debris than it is to deploy and assemble the thing there in the first place. And there are a few terrestrial actors rather capable of this. More than there are who could make it happen under whatever optimistic assumptions anyway. In itself, a structure of this size in orbit is an efficient catcher of micrometeorites and orbital debris. Over "non-eternal" timeframes you don't even need a bad actor with good rockets. Nevermind that in such a case, the eventual fate of these sizeable chunks of orbital debris is to become rods of god ... just without particular steerability. It'd be a sight.
      • ikiris 10mo ago
        Don't be coy, please indicate the math that works differently in silicon in a zero g environment if its not some regulation dodge.
        • d_silin 10mo ago
          People in comments figured out half the answer already, the remaining half is left as an exercise for audience.
      • hirsin 10mo ago
        At this point I'm going to assume that anyone pushing datacenters in space wants to host child pornography. That's the only realistic workload that ticks all the boxes for orbital datacenters.
        • ViscountPenguin 10mo ago
          I don't think it would "solve" little any of the legal issues with Child Pornography (not if the owner lived on earth, at least), but it would make a great and politically convenient target for space to earth weaponry.
          • hirsin 10mo ago
            Oh, fully agreed. Orbital datacenters don't solve many to any engineering problems either, so I figure its adherents are as much into legal problem solving as they are engineering problem solving.
  • CobrastanJorji 10mo ago
    But if cost of the space GPUs is higher then the land GPUs, why would demand matter? Is there limited land? Are space GPUs better for some reason, like perhaps they can't be regulated as easily or because our AGI overlords will be less vulnerable to mobs with pitchforks?
• Glyptodon 10mo ago
  I guess I'd assume that the premise driving this would be that there will eventually be enough business in space that it's necessary for space-centric use, and that terrestrial use is just a fringe benefit or loss leader or something. But oddly this doesn't seem to be how the concept is typically framed. My second level curiosity is how much cheaper/competitive it'd be if we had space elevators.
  • xgulfie 10mo ago
    Space elevators are pretend, you may as well ask if it would be cheaper if we had dilithium crystals
  • KineticLensman 10mo ago
    space-elevators require various types of unobtanium and have their own logistics challenges not to mention failure modes that involve spattering fast moving debris round the entire equator
    • Glyptodon 10mo ago
      Obviously I don't expect one next Tuesday. I just think it'd be interesting to see how it alters the picture.
• HardCodedBias 10mo ago
  I suspect that this orbital data centers isn't entirely about dollars (No doubt dollars are important). I suspect it is about the regulatory environment. The regulatory environment on data centers is moving quickly. Data centers used to be considered a small portion of the economy and thus benign and not worth extorting/controlling. This seems to be changing, rapidly. Given that data centers only exchange information with their consumers they are a natural candidate for using orbit as a way to escape regulators. Further, people are likely betting that regulators will take considerable time to adjust since space is multinational.
  • klysm 10mo ago
    How on earth does that justify the astronomic expense difference?
    • guywithahat 10mo ago
      Well the argument some of these companies are making is that it would be cheaper over 10 years (some things like power can be cheaper in space, and you can get it from solar nearly 24h a day). It seems likely to me (as it does many other people) that it won't be cheaper, but if it's the same price or mildly more expensive there might be a regulatory incentive to train a ML model in space instead of a place like the EU
  • GMoromisato 10mo ago
    True, but businesses don't care about regulations except where it costs them money. Also, remember that time is money, so any regulatory delays cost real money to a business. My point is that you can actually reduce it all to dollars. And I believe that the cost of orbital data centers will come down due to technological advances, while the cost of regulation will only go up, because of local and global opposition.
    • HardCodedBias 10mo ago
      "My point is that you can actually reduce it all to dollars." I'm not sure. A couple of points: 1) The regulatory landscape is enormous. It is unknown from which angle regulators will "slow you down." 2) As I mentioned the regulatory frameworks in this area are evolving very quickly. It is unknown what the regulations will be in 1, 2, 5 years and how that will impact your business.
• zokier 10mo ago
  tbh this feels lot like people throwing Drake equation around. You put in whatever random numbers together and you can get any result you want.
  • SyzygyRhythm 10mo ago
    We know the upper bound for most of those numbers. SpaceX already achieves internal marginal launch costs of ~$1000/kg, for instance. We know their rough costs per satellite. In contrast, we know little to nothing about the inputs to the Drake equation. The numbers don't quite work out in favor of orbital datacenters at the current values. But we can tell from analyses like this what has to change to get there.
    • ted_dunning 10mo ago
      You use of the word "quite" is highly "innovative".
    • enderfusion 10mo ago
      OP here. Thanks SyzygyRhythm
  • BonoboIO 10mo ago
    The cooling and density challenges of datacenters here on earth are not trivial , but in space this is multiple magnitudes more difficult. These numbers are just random bullsh*t numbers. And what problems do orbital datacenters solve? They still need uplink, so not libertarian we can do what we want, you have no jurisdiction here thing. This is just a sci-fi idea that is theoretically possible and is riding the ai bubble for users and investors that don’t know better.
• GMoromisato 10mo ago
  > ...we should be actively goading more billionaires into spending on irrational, high-variance projects that might actually advance civilization. I feel genuine secondhand embarrassment watching people torch their fortunes on yachts and status cosplay. No one cares about your Loro Piana. I 100% agree with this. There are ~2,600 billionaires in the world and we should encourage all of them to spend their money. Even buying a superyacht is a benefit to the economy. But the best billionaires, like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, are actually trying to advance the tech tree. We are honestly lucky that Musk is wired funny. Any normal human being would retire and hang out on the beach with supermodels after all the abuse he has taken. But he takes it all as a personal challenge and doubles down. That is both his worst quality and his best.
  • markus_zhang 10mo ago
    Any normal human being may hang out with models for a while but I guess they will promote their own ideas very soon. $$$ brings power.
  • mmooss 10mo ago
    > Any normal human being would retire and hang out on the beach with supermodels after all the abuse he has taken. First, he seeks and creates conflict. He isn't 'taking' abuse, except in the sense that he is reaching out and grasping at it. Everyone in that position takes lots of abuse. If they built their own fortune, they generally don't retire to the beach or they would have long ago.
    • GMoromisato 10mo ago
      I will agree that if he hadn't aligned himself with Trump/MAGA he would have a much lower profile. But I think we'd be better off if taking a political position did not automatically piss off half the country. I think a lot of competent but normal people refuse the get involved in politics because of how toxic it is. I wish Musk had stayed out of politics, but I'm glad he hasn't given up on Tesla/SpaceX just because of the enemies he's made. I think any normal person would have.
• CobrastanJorji 10mo ago
  This is very well done! I love including all the sliders so that we can play with the (reasonable looking) assumptions the author has made. Like the author, I share their surprise that the result did not come out even more in favor of terrestrial GPUs.
• zozbot234 10mo ago
  Will these space-based data centers run on rad-hard silicon (which is dog slow compared to anything on Earth) or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure due to the harsh space environment? Will they cool that hardware with special über-expensive high-temperature Peltiers that heat the radiators up to visible incandescence so that the heat can be shed with any efficiency? There's zillions of those issues. The whole idea is just bonkers.
  • wmf 10mo ago
    rad-hard silicon ... or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure Somehow I don't think those are the only options. AFAIK Starlink is using a lot of non-rad-hard silicon already.
    • notahacker 10mo ago
      Your other options of fault tolerance typically achieved by doing everything at least twice and being willing to reboot (and accepting attrition from total ionizing radiation) or lots of shielding are fine for building functioning space hardware but suboptimal for building datacentre business models...
    • johnsmith1840 10mo ago
      My understanding is non rad hardened method get around this by basically doubling or some multiple of repeating calculations and chexking data often. Random errors will occur you just need to be checking fast enough to fix and update that bad bit flip. I am sure there's all sorts of fun algorithms in this space but I am under the impression there is SOME tax to doing this. What is the tax? Is it 10% ir 60% I have no idea would love to know!
      • danpalmer 10mo ago
        There's more than that, it's possible to get permanent hardware damage from radiation at smaller (modern standard) process sizes.
• sc68cal 10mo ago
  When Starcloud put together that whitepaper the first thing I looked at was the launch costs[1]. It references a $5M cost to launch, which right away made absolutely no sense to me. Just a cursory search shows launch costs are around $50M per launch, if not more. It's great that this site drills down even further to demonstrate that there is absolutely no point at which the launch costs ever make this economical or viable, so I really don't understand what people are doing. Especially because this site was harping for years about the cost of launches and putting things in to orbit, the whole reason why SpaceX got started and has grown as it has. As soon as that became an inconvenient number, we now just make things up (Just pretend that launch costs are 10% of what they actually are to get people to invest?). [1]: https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
  • JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
    > Just a cursory search shows launch costs are around $50M per launch I think datacentres in space are predicated on Starship bringing launch costs down. Way down.
    • indolering 10mo ago
      Spinlaunch is also promising drastically reduced cost per launch. The payload size for their first launcher is pretty small and they appear to be struggling to get the kinetic launcher online.
      • jiggawatts 10mo ago
        Spinlaunch is an outright scam. Their main product is taxing people for inadequate knowledge of basic physics. And engineering. Also… common sense.
  • jaywee 10mo ago
    Don't confuse launch _price_ with launch _cost_. It's been estimated the internal F9 launch costs are around $15M-$20M. The $5M is a marginal cost-target for fully reusable Starship.
• piskov 10mo ago
  There was already an article of how this thing is just ain’t gonna happen: https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/ https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri... — If I were to guess, my first bet would be grand PR damage control for all the Mexicans, Irish, and what have you as in “don’t worry, we’ll soon be in space and out of your backyard” (no, they won’t). https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/technology/ai-data-center-backlash-mexico-ireland.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/technology/ai-data-center...
• mrinterweb 10mo ago
  I realize terrestrial data centers have environmental risks, but are the risks greater for an orbital data center? I would think space debris, solar flares, or a bad actor satellite with a laser could do a lot of damage. Good luck repairing the orbital data center.
  • wmf 10mo ago
    Now imagine that the risks aren't being evaluated objectively. Imagine if the risks of terrestrial data centers have been exaggerated 100x.
• jofer 10mo ago
  What really worries me is that I keep hearing "cooling is cheap and easy in space!" in a lot of these conversations, and it couldn't be farther from the truth. Cooling is _really_ hard and can't use efficient (i.e. advection-based air or water cooling) approaches and are limited to dramatically less efficient radiative cooling. It doesn't matter that space is cold because cooling is damned hard in a vacuum. The article makes this point, but it's relatively far in and I felt it was worth making again. With that said, my employer now appears to be in this business, so I guess if there's money there, we can build the satellites. (Note: opinions my own) I just don't see how it makes sense from a practical technical perspective. Space is a much harder place to run datacenters.
  • wmf 10mo ago
    None of it is easy but neither is cooling impossible as many people are saying.
    • mjhay 10mo ago
      There’s a big difference between “impossible” (it isn’t) and “practical” (it isn’t).
      • dzhiurgis 10mo ago
        What happened to "do things that don't scale"?
        • WJW 10mo ago
          Maybe you should re-read the "do things that don't scale" article. It is about doing things manually until you figure out what you should automate, and only then do you automate it. It's not about doing unscalable things forever. Unless you have a plan to change the laws of physics, space will always be a good insulator compared to what we have here on Earth.
          • dzhiurgis 10mo ago
• nixonpjoshua 10mo ago
  I am reminded of how space exploration has come largely before deep ocean exploration, seems like a human bias. Putting data centers under water makes way way more sense than into space.
  • JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
    > Putting data centers under water makes way way more sense than into space You need permits underwater. You don’t in space.
    • notahacker 10mo ago
      The FCC regulates satellites launched from or communicating with the US, including stuff which extends beyond spectrum licensing like mandatory 5 year deorbiting capability for newly launched LEO satellites. Europe, China and India are not regulation-free utopias either. You've actually got more option to jurisdiction-shop with underwater data, but I'm not convinced that's the major issue with building datacentres anyway. Ultimately there are latency and minimise data-transfer arguments for doing certain types of data processing on local machines in space, but the generalised compute and model-training argument only works if the unit economics stack up as sufficiently good to cover the risk and R&D, and they're not obviously favourable compared with cold place on earth with clear skies and access to cold water even assuming launch costs become minimal. (It's slightly amusing to see how much some advocates of that other controversial futurist vision of spaced-based solar power - whose chances of success equally depend on low launch costs - viscerally hate the latest wave of datacentres-in-space hype...)
      • JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
        > FCC regulates satellites launched from or communicating with the US FCC is easier to deal with than multiple layers of environmental, planning, power, and water concerns at the local, state and federal levels. > they're not obviously favourable compared with cold place on earth with clear skies and access to cold water There are fewer of those places that can be developed than there is space. The bottleneck to space is launch. The bottleneck on the ground is power. I don’t think anyone thinks the math works right now. But as OP showed, it’s surprisingly proximate in a way SBSP is not.
• modeless 10mo ago
  I love the sliders, but note that the numbers on this site literally came from ChatGPT, so there is plenty of room for disagreement. Seems like according to this analysis it all hinges on launch cost and satellite cost. This site's default for Starship launch cost is $500/kg, but SpaceX is targeting much lower than that, more like $100/kg and eventually optimistically $10/kg (the slider doesn't even go that low). At $100/kg (and assuming all the other assumptions made on the site hold) then you break even on cost vs. terrestrial if you can make the satellites for $7/watt (excluding GPUs, as the whole analysis does).
  • bediger4000 10mo ago
    Aerospace industry has a long history of missing lower cost/kg to orbit. I'm extremely suspicious of $500/kg, which is about a third of today's cost.
    • modeless 10mo ago
      OTOH SpaceX has a pretty good history of undercutting the industry on cost. If Starship full reusability works I would be very surprised if it only lowered launch costs by a factor of three. Of course it's not guaranteed to work, but clearly SpaceX's orbital datacenter plans are predicated on Starship working.
      • ted_dunning 10mo ago
        SpaceX has never met any milestone that Elon has ever set.
        • modeless 10mo ago
          OTOH they have achieved many things that experienced people said were impossible or would never make financial sense.
          • DonHopkins 10mo ago
            OTOH they have a huge batshit crazy fanbase of boot lickers who are so gullible they'll believe and parrot anything Elon says.
• JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
  I’d love to see these variables fitted to learning curves. That would give you a forecast for when, if learning continues as predicted, the economics could be competitive. (If it doesn’t, you need a new paradigm first.)
• waterTanuki 10mo ago
  I'm not really interested in the problems that can come with orbital compute. We've seen them listed ad nauseam. Have we seen any benefits to orbital computing by launching a cluster of raspberry pis to LEO? Surely this isn't an impossible task to test out on a smaller scale?
  • deddy 10mo ago
    There isn’t really much benefit to having compute on orbit unless you’re working on VERY specific applications that have such tight latency requirements where you need to process the data immediately as it comes out of the sensor. In which case you just implement the algorithms in ASICs or FPGAs anyways. There have been NVIDIA Jetsons or better on orbit since at least 2021 and that had no meaningful impact on any actual meaningful compute workloads beyond proof of concept demos.
• xnx 10mo ago
  François Chollet https://x.com/fchollet/status/1999982683708150014 https://x.com/fchollet/status/1999982683708150014 : "Datacenters in space" make for a catchy narrative and an interesting demo, but the math simply doesn't work. When considering factors like launch cost, maintenance complexity, and the cost of high-bandwidth communications (latency included), there is no realistic set of economic and engineering assumptions under which orbiting datacenters become cost-competitive with simply building conventional nuclear-powered (or renewable energy-powered) datacenters on the ground. In fact we're off by 50-100x. Dramatic launch cost reductions still won't make it work. And of course if you invest a lot in specific lines of tech to make it work you then have to consider that the same can also be invested in better ground-based nuclear, bringing the cost of power down for everyone.
  • wmf 10mo ago
    So the guy who shows his work says 3.4x and the guy who doesn't says 50-100x.
    • enderfusion 10mo ago
      OP here. man who quotes big number - often made a fool
• bgwalter 10mo ago
  I have no idea what this Grok assisted article is trying to say. But the data-center-in-space hype is irrational. It hand-waves cooling and bit flip errors. It does not explain why we need chat bots in space (we don't need them on earth either). It is a nice talking point for the U.S. Saudi Investment Forum. The Saudis apparently buy anything: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2000603814249079165#m https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2000603814249079165#m
• brotchie 10mo ago
  Did a similar back-of-the-napkin and got 5x $ / MW of orbital vs. terrestrial. This article's analysis is ~3.4x. I do wonder, at what factor of orbital to terrestrial cost factor it becomes worthwhile. The greater the terrestrial lead time, red tape, permitting, regulations on Earth, the higher the orbital-to-terrestrial factor that's acceptable. A lights-out automated production line pumping out GPU satellites into a daily Starship launch feels "cleaner" from an end-to-end automation perspective vs years long land acquisition, planning and environment approvals, construction. More expensive, for sure, but feels way more copy-paste the factory, "linearly scalable" than physical construction.
  • notahacker 10mo ago
    It becomes worthwhile if its actually cheaper (probably significantly cheaper given R&D and risk), or if you're processing data which originates in space and the data transfer or latency is an issue You can set up plant manufacturing chips in shipping containers and sending them to wherever energy/land is cheapest and regulation most suitable, without having to seek the FCCs approval to get launch approved and your data back...
  • nick486 10mo ago
    people use aws despite it being 2x-10x the cost of self hosting. cost isnt everything.
• TrainedMonkey 10mo ago
  AFAIK compute heavy datacenter in space don't work. But if you already have a vast fleet of laser connected LEO satellites throwing some efficient SSDs into them can make a lot of sense. A large portion of the traffic is fairly static, e.g. video based content or even model weights. Caching that will save you ground to space side of the transmission. This will let you put more user beams on satellites and use less ground stations.
• Ataraxic 10mo ago
  Scott Manley had a video about this last year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-YcVLq98Ew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-YcVLq98Ew The short of it is that cooling is likely the biggest problem, given you will need to pump the heat to the backside and radiate it away, and the amount of mass you will need to dedicate to cooling works against deployments and increases the cost per unit significantly. Not to mention, the idea of these huge deployments runs into potential space debris issues. Whenever one of these ventures actually manages to launch a proof of concept, I think we'll be able to quickly discern if there is actually a near-future here.
• daemonologist 10mo ago
  > This is all to say that the current discourse is increasingly bothering me due to the lack of rigor; people are using back-of-the-envelope math, doing a terrible job of it, and only confirming whatever conclusion they already want. Calculating radiation and the cost of goods is not difficult. Run the numbers. > References: Gemini, Gemini, ChatGPT, ChatGPT, Gemini, ChatGPT, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini (There are sub-references from these services in the GitHub.) I think, if you're going to make statements like this - especially from a position of expertise, you should be personally verifying the numbers and citing their sources directly. What good is asking the reader to trust an AI on your behalf? They should trust you. (To be clear, I suspect the conclusions drawn are still correct.)
  • sigmar 10mo ago
    >This isn't about talent. It's about integration... Vertical integration isn't a nice-to-have. It's the whole ballgame. I'm going to assume there's tons of logical errors and oversights in the math, considering the author couldn't even be bothered to write the text of the post himself.
• Terr_ 10mo ago
  I sometimes wonder if there are people out there who just read too much Neuromancer, and they think they can construct their own Tessier-Ashpool orbital dynasty. I suppose there are several other Oligarchs In Space stories and movies since then, but if the point of the space station is to host AI, that narrows it down a bit. Or perhaps it's performative, designed to spook gullible politicians into changing laws to "keep" businesses that were never actually going to go somewhere else anyway.
• DesiLurker 10mo ago
  this does not makes sense from dollars pov to me, I ran a back of napkin session with claude & gemini on this and the short of it is you need a magical weightless radiator for cooling and even then it wont work because the launch costs need to be sub $100 before this can be feasible. this does not even factors the 5y amortization and LEO orbit drag correction. It then occurred to me that they (all major AI companies) know all of these facts but still pushing for it so there must be another reason. Then I recalled the offhand statement from the openAI lady about govt backstop for infra, which was strongly opposed by public and AI czar. this might be be a backdoor way of injecting that backstop capital in terms of subsidies now for results in 5 years or so. and needless to say after pilot programs those will fail spectacularly.
• enderfusion 10mo ago
  OP here. Happy to answer any questions, appreciate the boost.
• octaane 10mo ago
  The only benefit as I perceive it re: orbital data center hardware is regulatory avoidance. Think...DDOS machines that can't be shut off; or financial hosting services for unsavory individuals. However, it's very expensive by all metrics (including those talked about in the article), and frankly, these satellites are sitting ducks for the hunter killer satellites the various space powers have, if they actually wanted to do something about these hypothtical data centers and the problems they would cause.
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • myrmidon 10mo ago
    I don't see how this is really much different from just setting up servers in some underregulated banana republic; to do anything, you still need a connection to the public internet, and somewhat regulated nations like the EU or US can just block/prosecute at that interface.
• anonymousiam 10mo ago
  This is an interesting analysis, and I like the sliders that let you instantly show the impacts of system trades. The one glaring hole that I see is the challenge of moving the data to/from the datacenter while it's on orbit. Bandwidth to/from space isn't free. FCC/ITU licenses are required, transmitters/receiviers/modems/DSP/antennas all add to SWAP (size, weight, and power). Ground-stations are needed to move the data up/down, but those have recently become a commodity too. Still, they're not free. (see: https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station) There is also the added latency between earth-based users and space-based datacenters, which may be a deal breaker for some applications. Another issue I don't see covered are the significant differences between space-based hardware and terrestrial hardware. The space stuff needs to be radiation tolerant, and that usually makes it a lot slower and a lot more expensive than the terrestrial stuff, all other things being equal. In the end, space-based datacenters are highly impractical even if you assume that Starship can put anything into orbit very cheaply.
  • DoctorOetker 10mo ago
    The most chased workload will inevitably be cryptographic research, proofs of mathematical statements are hard to find the proof for, but tend to be short and easy to verify once a putative proof is presented. Just send the proofs back to earth.
• boddu 10mo ago
  Really interesting article. Curious to see the ChatGPT link attached But when I click on it, I get this error. Failed to load shared conversation. Request is not allowed. Please try again later. (403, 9aebe525df75165e-BLR)
• rswail 10mo ago
  Aside from the economics, the question is why do it in orbit vs on land (or sea)? What are the regulatory/legal gains? Lack of jurisdiction means open slather? What are the national security gains? Redundancy and resiliency by each satellite being a "micro-compute" connected by high speed laser links? So more resilient to attack? Why do it at all?
  • eldenring 10mo ago
    I think the main draw is its elegance. You have very efficient power from the sun, put that directly into your compute, radiate it out. Energy is ~free, no heavy infrastructure required, just a closed circuit for computing.
    • rswail 10mo ago
      Elegance compared to a PV/Storage facility built next door to a data centre? It doesn't make sense right now, and won't for at least 5-10 years. By which time, this current round of hype will have burned up ~$1T if it doesn't fall apart from the current internal contradictions and lack of market/customers/uses. We're still on the uphill ride of the Gartner hype cycle, not even at the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" yet.
    • KeplerBoy 10mo ago
      We also have very efficient power from the sun here on earth. I don't get how that is an argument.
  • ygouzerh 10mo ago
    I think the only reason is for legal purpose. If data is downloaded illegally from space, stored in space and model trained on it... it will be a mess juridically if someone complain. Same for model inference, it will be hard for a government to put controls on the model output.
• patrick4urcloud 10mo ago
  so the conclusion is orbital datacenter is a very bad idea ?
• zkmon 10mo ago
  Economics for who? The builder of the data center and plethora of all contractors and sub-contractors would see great economics though. Even the sponsor/owner of the data center might see economics work out, if you consider the reputational gain (why did we land on Moon? what's the economics?), experience gained and considering the burn of someone else's money. The money of mega companies that go into this kind of "monuments" is not exactly theirs.
  • simianwords 10mo ago
    Who's money is it?
    • westpfelia 10mo ago
      Tax payers
      • zkmon 10mo ago
        Tax payer won't get refund whether the data center is built or not.
        • cess11 10mo ago
          Why not? Wouldn't it be great if we could get child care, education, infrastructure, housing, care of the elderly and so on instead?
• lifeisstillgood 10mo ago
  I am struggling with a why for this (other than “huh cool, that will get investors”). All the jurisdiction and regulation arguments and the “we could get the costs down” seem to meet the objection of “for the same investment we could do just as well or better on the ground”. The one that does not is the physics of the whole thing. I struggle to work out how exactly but being slightly time dilated compared to the ground does not seem like a win, but being able to gather data from opposite sides of the planet slightly faster than cables does seem like a potential win. Most stock exchanges make a significant chunk of their revenues renting out data space, so it seems a possibility. But either way it seems very niche.
  • physicles 10mo ago
    I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but since SpaceX is the only launch services provider that could actually put one of these in orbit, this smells a lot like hyperloop to me — an unserious proposal that serves as a distraction and furthers Musk’s aims, and benefits anyone who can get close enough to the piles of cash that VCs will drop on this. You know what’s easier and cheaper than putting a data center in space? Putting one literally anywhere else other than space.
• cdf 10mo ago
  Does anybody actually work with H100s and the like? Their failure rate is so high, I dont understand why anybody will even consider it feasible to put the machines in orbit or even the sea. By my ballpark estimate, if you have 800 H100s, after 6 months, about 100 would be overheating or throttling, and a few will disappear and one or two will crash the machine with load.
  • titzer 10mo ago
    > Does anybody actually work with H100s and the like? They don't. The expectation the cloud develops in people is that magic computers just appear. They're living at a virtualized layer where all the nitty gritty of real machines going down and needing to be serviced all the time is handled by unseen minions (sorry SREs and DC staff) and cluster management and provisioning software. The reality is that datacenters in space is mind-boggling stupid, just from the infeasibility of maintenance alone.
• cess11 10mo ago
  One of the main reasons for putting "compute" and "storage" in space is that it is out of reach for the general public and would allow for more stability in exceptionally intense tyranny. It is much easier to blow things up on land than in space, and the 'negative externalities' simpler to make assumptions about. The value of this to the people who would be in charge of this "compute" and "storage" is likely much larger than the difference in energy cost.
• Gazoche 10mo ago
  For someone who is "increasingly bothered by the lack of rigor in the current discourse", the author sure has no qualms about using LLM outputs as primary sources. This is an immediate red flag that discredits the entire article.
• uplifter 10mo ago
  Here's some math on how affordable that abundant LEO solar energy is: First you have to pay energy to get to LEO A Starship Launch costs[0] 51.75 TJ of energy in terms of its methane fuel. It will be able to take a payload of 150 tonnes or 331,000 pounds[1]. How many computers is that? One online estimate says a computer weights 80 lbs or 35 kg. So 150000 kg / 35 kg/computer = approximately 4285 computers that we can launch into orbit per Starship. 51.75TJ / 4285 computers = approximately 12.08 GJ per computer to place it in orbit. Let's say each computer is a H200 and consumes 700 watts continuously. How long would it need to run in orbit before it used as much energy for computation as it took to launch it? 12.08 GJ / 700 W = 12,080,000,000 J / 700 J/s = approximately 17,257,143 seconds. Or about 6.5 months to break even on energy. That sounds pretty good, except my estimate for the weight of each compute unit and associated power system & cooling etc. are probably underestimates by one or two orders of magnitude. In which case you'd be looking at 5 to 50 years to break even on energy, by which time the chips are obsolete and need to be replaced anyway. [0] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/66480/how-much-energy-is-used-for-a-starship-launch https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/66480/how-much-ene... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship#Description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship#Description
  • verzali 10mo ago
    You are just launching computers, with no propulsion, no attitude control, no solar panels, no radio/laser systems, no radiators. So all of that will take mass away from the computing power. A starlink satellite already weighs about 1000kg, and that really is just the supporting infrastructure you need before you start adding computers... So yes, 10-100x extra is probably reasonable.
  • ralfd 10mo ago
    Methanes energy can only be converted about 50% into electricity though.
• thatjoeoverthr 10mo ago
  The analyses here miss the economic realities of building datacenters. "Just use land", "just use nuclear", "just use water". All of this is contested. A system of lawsuits and regulations turns negative externalities (even ones you aren't convinced of!) into costs you can weigh against. So, like hydrogen vs. RP-1, it's not enough to pick a handful of physical performance metrics. It has to win holistically. If you can produce any kind of economically productive compute node and add it to (for example) the Starlink network, and launch on a reusable vehicle, you carry on installing them as fast as you can build them. So, the move is to turn the problem of contested land use into a manufacturing problem. This is not so easy to pin down on a spreadsheet, and will be decided at the level of the business unit. If SpaceX can put a GPU/TPU on the grid more economically than the other guy, then it doesn't matter if they have ammonia in the pipes instead of water. Grab your popcorn.
  • baq 10mo ago
    The article makes pretty much exactly this point somewhere in the middle. > the list of organizations positioned to even try that is basically one. Maaaaybe Blue Origin can join once they get a constellation going.
• carlosseru 10mo ago
  it would only make sense if land availability for DCs is 0 or truly expensive… Someone might be foreseeing an scenario like that? Are satellite launchers behind this hype?
• Schlagbohrer 10mo ago
  For someone engaging in a lot of fun, sci fi utopian thinking, he still falls prey to libertarian thought: "I'll go one step further and say the quiet part out loud: we should be actively goading more billionaires into spending on irrational, high-variance projects that might actually advance civilization. I feel genuine secondhand embarrassment watching people torch their fortunes on yachts and status cosplay. No one cares about your Loro Piana. If you've built an empire, the best possible use of it is to burn its capital like a torch and light up a corner of the future. Fund the ugly middle. Pay for the iteration loops. Build the cathedrals. This is how we advance civilization." That can be done easily (and has been done many times in the past! And in the present, elsewhere in the world outside the US!) by TAXING the billionaires and using that money for government funded research programs such as DARPA, NSF, national space programs that are actually ambitious and risk taking and held to timelines. Americans need to get over this idea that billionaires are gods that we must pray to and instead see them as just normal citizens who need to be taxed way more.
• metalman 10mo ago
  the cost of having very fast up/down syncrounous data/compute,comunications to any random spot on the planet, at any time, in a very hard to interupt or detect manner, is, what it is and can not be compared to anything else
• Gazoche 10mo ago
  Cons of orbital data centers: - Ludicrously expensive to setup - Need radiation-hardened silicon - Ludicrously expensive maintenance requiring highly specialized operators (a.k.a astronauts) - High risk of losing the entire equipment to a rocket failure (not infrequent even for modern launch vehicles) - Supplying enough electrical power would be extremely difficult - Cooling would be extremely difficult - Geosynchronous orbits have at least 200ms of communication latency - Lower orbits means the data center would not stay in place and require complicated tracking antennae and/or a communication mesh a la Starlink, again increasing latency and complexity Pros of orbital data centers: - ?????? ...why are we doing this again?
• faidit 10mo ago
  Terrestrial may be cheaper but it can be burned down by peasant mobs. To become an immortal god you must remove all meat-based legacy threats.
• TitaRusell 10mo ago
  Right now all my favourite pirate sites are based in Russia but moving them to extrateritorial space would be genius! Americans couldn't shoot at it in fear of igniting a space war with China.
• Teknomadix 10mo ago
  Very doable with Photonic compute in orbit: Way less waste heat (huge when you can only radiate it away), lower power draw per FLOP (smaller solar arrays), and photons don't give a damn about cosmic radiation causing bit flips.
• mojosam 10mo ago
  > That "why" is almost missing from the public conversation. People jump straight to hardware and hand-wave the business case, as if the economics are self-evident. They aren't. But then he never answers that fundamental question, and jumps straight to the hardware and power and cost? What problems are orbital data centers trying to solve? What optimizations are they intended to deliver? Are these optimizations beneficial to everyone who uses a data centers, or just operators or users of orbiting satellite constellations? > But the knock-on effects are why this keeps pulling at people. If you can industrialize power and operations in orbit at meaningful scale, you're not just running GPUs. You're building a new kind of infrastructure that makes it easier for humans to keep spreading out. Compute is just one of the first excuses to pay for the scaffolding. This seems to be the closest we get to a “Why”, but it doesn’t make much sense. A constellation of 40,000 satellites with GPUs “infrastructure that makes it easier for humans to keep spreading out”? How? > The target I care about is simple: can you make space-based, commodity compute cost-competitive with the cheapest terrestrial alternative? That's the whole claim. … Can you deliver useful watts and reject the waste heat at a price that beats a boring Crusoe-style tilt-wall datacenter tied into a 200–500 MW substation? Isn’t the answer clearly “No”? The default settings of his model — which I assume he considers optimal — tell us that power for orbital data enters will cost 3.5X terrestrial ones. And that only SpaceX has the vertical integration to do even attempt to do this. So again, where is the competitive advantage? Also, I don’t understand why he’s including satellite construction and launch costs for a 40,000 satellite constellations in his analysis, if he’s assuming SpaceX as he claims. Wouldn’t SpaceX simply implement these compute capabilities in the next gen of Starlink, so which would reduce costs significantly. > It might not be rational. But it might be physically possible. But isn’t that precisely what everyone has been saying? I don’t think the question has been whether orbital data centers are possible, it’s been whether they are rational. And that centers foremost h the unanswered question, Why is this a good idea?
  • arijun 10mo ago
    > But then he never answers that fundamental question The fundamental question is “is it economically viable”, and the answer from his model is “not really” > A constellation of 40,000 satellites with GPUs “infrastructure that makes it easier for humans to keep spreading out”? I think he’s claiming industrializing larger and more economical power generation in space, as well as the means to put it up there, would make it easier to transition to a theoretical space economy > But isn’t that precisely what everyone has been saying? From the article, he claims that people handwave the economics, so at least the people he has interacted with haven’t been saying that.
• kibwen 10mo ago
  This is AI slop in a pretty dress. It's fascinating that space-based datacenters are such a catastrophically bad investment that even limp apologia like this can, at best, argue that maybe it's not quite as bad as you think, as long as you still manage to ignore half the costs because you're a loser who delegated your thinking to a chatbot.
• thenthenthen 10mo ago
  The 'Satellite Size' slider does not seem to impact the cost, also not in relation to changing the other settings?
• AlexC04 10mo ago
  do it on mars then... that would have the added benefit of heating the planet so we could live on it. It seems so obvious if you think about it. Someone transfer eleventy trillion dollars to Elon Musk so we can get started.
• 1970-01-01 10mo ago
  Hilarious how they could easily validate this by PoC. Even putting a small RasPi cluster in orbit. Do that and make a profit. Then ask for money.
• clickety_clack 10mo ago
  On the ground you don’t have to fling tons of sensitive electronics to orbital speeds, you can have someone pop by to check whether everything is ok if you get an alert, you have a thick atmosphere cutting down solar radiation, you can cool everything relatively cheaply, and you can run fiber and power cables directly into the building. In space ou have to design super robust and self maintaining machinery. It’s a cool marketing stunt, but I don’t get the economics behind doing it for real.
• bigbadfeline 10mo ago
  Great article, with dollars and numbers as it should be. The proponents of orbital wunderbars may have different calculations and there's only one way to resolve the differences - make them pay for their space-centers themselves, making sure no public money is spent on the project which is also required to carry zero default risk and pay regular taxes without the right to claim deductions or write-offs for any losses. All this is necessary to avoid the usual corporate tax games. I can sketch a contract to that end in like 10 minutes. Everything else is a waste of time.