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You operate them like Microsoft's submerged data center project: you don't do maintenance, whatever fails fails. You start with enough redundancy in critical co

You operate them like Microsoft's submerged data center project: you don't do maintenance, whatever fails fails. You start with enough redundancy in critical components like power and networking and accept that compute resources will slowly decrease as nodes fail No operational needs is obviously ... simplified. You still need to manage downlink capacity, station keeping, collision avoidance, etc. But for a large constellation the per-satellite cost of that would be pretty small.

fred_is_fred 9mo ago
Being under the ocean in a metal box you don't get too many micro-meteors or cosmic rays though.
- gehsty 9mo ago
  Just like you don’t get much water in space.
  - manquer 9mo ago
    My understanding was that access to very large body of cold water was a core feature for the project. The water was to be used for cooling relatively efficiently or cheaply.
    - gehsty 9mo ago
      My point was that they are both quite hostile environments for different reasons. In the same way space has abundant power supply, subsea has an abundant heat sink.
- samsk 9mo ago
  ...and costs pennies compared to putting anything up there, so it can even enjoy those cosmic goodies.
willis936 9mo ago
How do you make a small fortune? Start with a big one. The thing being called obvious here is that the maintenance you have to do on earth is vastly cheaper than the overspeccing you need to do in space (otherwise we would overspec on earth). That's before even considering the harsh radiation environment and the incredible cost to put even a single pound into low earth orbit.
- observationist 9mo ago
  If you ramp up the economies of scale to make those things - radiation protection and cost per pound - the calculus changes. It's supposed to synergize with Starship, and immediately take advantage of the reduced cost per pound. If the cost per pound, power, regulatory burden, networking, and radiation shielding can be gamed out, as well as the thousand other technically difficult and probably expensive problems that can crop up, they have to sum to less than the effective cost of running that same datacenter here on earth. It's interesting that it doesn't play into Jevon's paradox the way it might otherwise - there's a reduction in power consumption planetside, if compute gets moved to space, but no equivalent expansion since the resource isn't transferable. I think some sort of space junk recycling would be necessary, especially at the terawatt scale being proposed - at some point vaporizing a bunch of arbitrary high temperature chemistry in the upper atmosphere isn't likely to be conducive to human well-being. Copper and aluminum and gold and so on are also probably worth recovering over allowing to be vaporized. With that much infrastructure in space, you start looking at recycling, manufacturing, collection in order to do cost reductions, so maybe part of the intent is to push into off-planet manufacturing and resource logistics? The whole thing's fascinating - if it works, that's a lot of compute. If it doesn't work, that's a lot of very expensive compute and shooting stars.
  - AceJohnny2 9mo ago
    some people really gotta stop huffing VC fumes
    - observationist 9mo ago
      Or, just saying, be critical of ideas and think them through, and take in what experts say about it, and determine for yourself what's up. If a bunch of people who usually seem to know what they're talking about think there's a legitimate shot at something you, as a fellow armchair analyst, think is completely impractical, it makes sense to go and see if maybe they know something you don't. In this case, it's all about Starship ramping up to such a scale that the cost per pound to orbit drops sufficiently for everything else to make sense - from the people who think the numbers can work, that means somewhere between $20 and $80 per pound, currently at $1300-1400 per pound with Falcon 9. Starship at scale would have to enable at least 2 full orders of magnitude decrease in price to make space compute viable. If Starship realistically gets into the $90/lb or lower range, space compute makes sense; things like shielding and the rest become pragmatic engineering problems that can be solved. If the cost goes above $100 or so, it doesn't matter how the rest of the considerations play out, you're launching at a loss. That still might warrant government, military, and research applications for space based datacenters, especially in developing the practical engineering, but Starship needs to work, and there needs to be a ton of them for the datacenter-in-space idea to work out.
jackyinger 9mo ago
Unless I missed something the Microsoft underwater data center was basically a publicity stunt. Anyone who thinks it makes sense to blast data centers into space has never seen how big and heavy they are, or thought about their immense power consumption, much less the challenge of radiating away that much waste heat into space.
- coryrc 9mo ago
  I don't think it was a stunt. It was an experiment. I think passive cooling (running hot) reduced some of the advantages of undersea compute.
- adastra22 9mo ago
  Radiation is an even bigger problem, especially in the polar orbits they are talking about.
  - jackyinger 9mo ago
    It’s only a problem if you get the machines up there! Which I’d argue is economically unviable to boot.
- borborigmus 9mo ago
  What about a data centre only running SQLite?
- moffkalast 9mo ago
  Well the thing is that it seemed to have been successful beyond all expectations despite being that? They had fewer failures due to the controlled atmosphere, great cooling that took no extra power, and low latency due to being close to offshore backbones. And I presume you don't really need to pay for the land you're using cause it's not really on land. Can one buy water? Space is pretty ridicolous, but underwater might genuinely be a good fit in certain areas.
  - baking 9mo ago
    I thought they had an issue with stuff growing on the cooling grates. Life likes to find warm water.
jasondigitized 9mo ago
Accountants love this
vonneumannstan 9mo ago
The financial system is already freaking out about depreciation on land based data centers. I don't think it could survive what you're talking about.
henning 9mo ago
This will totally work since we have an unlimited amount of rare earth elements we can just ship off into space never to see again. Infinite raw materials + infinite power equals infinite AI!!!
rybosworld 9mo ago
An 8 GPU B200 cluster goes for about $500k right now. You'd need to put thousands of those into space to mimic a ground-based data center. And the launch costs are best case around 10x the cost of the cluster itself. Letting them burn up in the atmosphere every time there's an issue does not sound sustainable.
- Wowfunhappy 9mo ago
  Playing devil's advocate, when a GPU dies you don't typically fix it, right? You just replace it. What if you could keep them in space long enough that by the time they burn up in the atmosphere, there are newer and better GPUs anyway? Still doesn't seem sustainable to me given launch costs and stuff (hence devil's advocate), but I can sort of see the case if I squint?
- soganess 9mo ago
  Are launch costs really 10x!? Could I get a source for that? In the back on my head this all seemed astronomically far-fetched, but 5.5 million to get 8 GPUs in space... wild. That isn't even a single TB of VRAM. Are you maybe factoring in the cost to powering them in space in that 5 million?
  - torginus 9mo ago
    I guess he adds the weight of all the hardware to make the whole thing work.
  - smw 9mo ago
    You also need square kms of radiators to cool 100MW
  - tinco 9mo ago
    The Falcon Heavy is $97 million per launch for 64000 kg to LEO, about $1,500 per kg. Starship is gonna be a factor 10 or if you believe Elon a factor 100 cheaper. A single NVidia system is ~140kg. So a single flight can have 350 of them + 14000kg for the system to power it. Right now 97 million to get it into space seems like a weird premium. Maybe with Starship the premium is less extreme? $10 million per 350 NVidia systems seems already within margins, and $1M would definitely put it in the range of being a rounding error. But that's only the Elon style "first principles" calculation. When reality hits it's going to be an engineering nightmare on the scale of nuclear power plants. I wouldn't be surprised if they'd spend a billion just figuring out how to get a datacenter operational in space. And you can build a lot of datacenters on earth for a billion. If you ask me, this is Elon scamming investors for his own personal goals, which is just the principle of having AI be in space. When AI is in space, there's a chance human derived intelligence will survive an extinction event on earth. That's one of the core motivations of Elon.
Veserv 9mo ago
You mean you operate them like Microsoft's failed submerged data center project [1]. When pointing at validating past examples you are generally supposed to point at successes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Natick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Natick
- dcanelhas 9mo ago
  The opposite of down is up, so it wouldn't be completely illogical.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  Did we read the same Wikipedia page? It doesn't say the word "failed" anywhere on it.
  - tadfisher 9mo ago
    > By 2024, Project Natick had been inactive for several years, though it was referenced in media as though it was ongoing. That year, Microsoft confirmed that the project was inactive and that it had no servers underwater. I wouldn't exactly call this a success, for that matter.
    - fragmede 9mo ago
      To me, failed, implies some sort of real failure, not just, "eh, won't make us enough money" a la Google/business since forever/the exec who's pet project it was moved on/had babies/was fired for unrelated reasons/some other human thing unrelated to the technical proposition. If, like, sea-water entered and corroded the system and it blew up and ate babies, and caused Godzilla, that would be a failure. It just being not quite interesting enough to go after seems... I mean I guess it is, but on a "meh" level.
      - AlexandrB 9mo ago
        "eh, won't make us enough money" would make space data centres a failure too. The whole point is to do compute more cheaply than a traditional data centre.
mlyle 9mo ago
You also have to get rid of waste heat :P
c22 9mo ago
How many submerged datacenters is Microsoft operating?
- baking 9mo ago
  Zero.
- iceboundrock 9mo ago
  None, https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-confirms-project-natick-underwater-data-center-is-no-more/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-confirm...
camdenreslink 9mo ago
But you could just run a “zero maintenance” data center on Earth and not pay to blast it into orbit.
MagicMoonlight 9mo ago
But if we’re going down that line of thinking then it’s a poor comparison. I could open a data centre on the ground and use the same principle of zero maintenance, and it would be way cheaper and way more powerful.

fred_is_fred 9mo ago

Being under the ocean in a metal box you don't get too many micro-meteors or cosmic rays though.

gehsty 9mo ago
Just like you don’t get much water in space.
- manquer 9mo ago
  My understanding was that access to very large body of cold water was a core feature for the project. The water was to be used for cooling relatively efficiently or cheaply.
  - gehsty 9mo ago
    My point was that they are both quite hostile environments for different reasons. In the same way space has abundant power supply, subsea has an abundant heat sink.
samsk 9mo ago
...and costs pennies compared to putting anything up there, so it can even enjoy those cosmic goodies.

willis936 9mo ago

How do you make a small fortune? Start with a big one. The thing being called obvious here is that the maintenance you have to do on earth is vastly cheaper than the overspeccing you need to do in space (otherwise we would overspec on earth). That's before even considering the harsh radiation environment and the incredible cost to put even a single pound into low earth orbit.

observationist 9mo ago
If you ramp up the economies of scale to make those things - radiation protection and cost per pound - the calculus changes. It's supposed to synergize with Starship, and immediately take advantage of the reduced cost per pound. If the cost per pound, power, regulatory burden, networking, and radiation shielding can be gamed out, as well as the thousand other technically difficult and probably expensive problems that can crop up, they have to sum to less than the effective cost of running that same datacenter here on earth. It's interesting that it doesn't play into Jevon's paradox the way it might otherwise - there's a reduction in power consumption planetside, if compute gets moved to space, but no equivalent expansion since the resource isn't transferable. I think some sort of space junk recycling would be necessary, especially at the terawatt scale being proposed - at some point vaporizing a bunch of arbitrary high temperature chemistry in the upper atmosphere isn't likely to be conducive to human well-being. Copper and aluminum and gold and so on are also probably worth recovering over allowing to be vaporized. With that much infrastructure in space, you start looking at recycling, manufacturing, collection in order to do cost reductions, so maybe part of the intent is to push into off-planet manufacturing and resource logistics? The whole thing's fascinating - if it works, that's a lot of compute. If it doesn't work, that's a lot of very expensive compute and shooting stars.
- AceJohnny2 9mo ago
  some people really gotta stop huffing VC fumes
  - observationist 9mo ago
    Or, just saying, be critical of ideas and think them through, and take in what experts say about it, and determine for yourself what's up. If a bunch of people who usually seem to know what they're talking about think there's a legitimate shot at something you, as a fellow armchair analyst, think is completely impractical, it makes sense to go and see if maybe they know something you don't. In this case, it's all about Starship ramping up to such a scale that the cost per pound to orbit drops sufficiently for everything else to make sense - from the people who think the numbers can work, that means somewhere between $20 and $80 per pound, currently at $1300-1400 per pound with Falcon 9. Starship at scale would have to enable at least 2 full orders of magnitude decrease in price to make space compute viable. If Starship realistically gets into the $90/lb or lower range, space compute makes sense; things like shielding and the rest become pragmatic engineering problems that can be solved. If the cost goes above $100 or so, it doesn't matter how the rest of the considerations play out, you're launching at a loss. That still might warrant government, military, and research applications for space based datacenters, especially in developing the practical engineering, but Starship needs to work, and there needs to be a ton of them for the datacenter-in-space idea to work out.

jackyinger 9mo ago

Unless I missed something the Microsoft underwater data center was basically a publicity stunt. Anyone who thinks it makes sense to blast data centers into space has never seen how big and heavy they are, or thought about their immense power consumption, much less the challenge of radiating away that much waste heat into space.

coryrc 9mo ago
I don't think it was a stunt. It was an experiment. I think passive cooling (running hot) reduced some of the advantages of undersea compute.
adastra22 9mo ago
Radiation is an even bigger problem, especially in the polar orbits they are talking about.
- jackyinger 9mo ago
  It’s only a problem if you get the machines up there! Which I’d argue is economically unviable to boot.
borborigmus 9mo ago
What about a data centre only running SQLite?
moffkalast 9mo ago
Well the thing is that it seemed to have been successful beyond all expectations despite being that? They had fewer failures due to the controlled atmosphere, great cooling that took no extra power, and low latency due to being close to offshore backbones. And I presume you don't really need to pay for the land you're using cause it's not really on land. Can one buy water? Space is pretty ridicolous, but underwater might genuinely be a good fit in certain areas.
- baking 9mo ago
  I thought they had an issue with stuff growing on the cooling grates. Life likes to find warm water.

jasondigitized 9mo ago

Accountants love this

vonneumannstan 9mo ago

The financial system is already freaking out about depreciation on land based data centers. I don't think it could survive what you're talking about.

henning 9mo ago

This will totally work since we have an unlimited amount of rare earth elements we can just ship off into space never to see again. Infinite raw materials + infinite power equals infinite AI!!!

rybosworld 9mo ago

An 8 GPU B200 cluster goes for about $500k right now. You'd need to put thousands of those into space to mimic a ground-based data center. And the launch costs are best case around 10x the cost of the cluster itself. Letting them burn up in the atmosphere every time there's an issue does not sound sustainable.

Wowfunhappy 9mo ago
Playing devil's advocate, when a GPU dies you don't typically fix it, right? You just replace it. What if you could keep them in space long enough that by the time they burn up in the atmosphere, there are newer and better GPUs anyway? Still doesn't seem sustainable to me given launch costs and stuff (hence devil's advocate), but I can sort of see the case if I squint?
soganess 9mo ago
Are launch costs really 10x!? Could I get a source for that? In the back on my head this all seemed astronomically far-fetched, but 5.5 million to get 8 GPUs in space... wild. That isn't even a single TB of VRAM. Are you maybe factoring in the cost to powering them in space in that 5 million?
- torginus 9mo ago
  I guess he adds the weight of all the hardware to make the whole thing work.
- smw 9mo ago
  You also need square kms of radiators to cool 100MW
- tinco 9mo ago
  The Falcon Heavy is $97 million per launch for 64000 kg to LEO, about $1,500 per kg. Starship is gonna be a factor 10 or if you believe Elon a factor 100 cheaper. A single NVidia system is ~140kg. So a single flight can have 350 of them + 14000kg for the system to power it. Right now 97 million to get it into space seems like a weird premium. Maybe with Starship the premium is less extreme? $10 million per 350 NVidia systems seems already within margins, and $1M would definitely put it in the range of being a rounding error. But that's only the Elon style "first principles" calculation. When reality hits it's going to be an engineering nightmare on the scale of nuclear power plants. I wouldn't be surprised if they'd spend a billion just figuring out how to get a datacenter operational in space. And you can build a lot of datacenters on earth for a billion. If you ask me, this is Elon scamming investors for his own personal goals, which is just the principle of having AI be in space. When AI is in space, there's a chance human derived intelligence will survive an extinction event on earth. That's one of the core motivations of Elon.

Veserv 9mo ago

You mean you operate them like Microsoft's failed submerged data center project [1]. When pointing at validating past examples you are generally supposed to point at successes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Natick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Natick

dcanelhas 9mo ago
The opposite of down is up, so it wouldn't be completely illogical.
fragmede 9mo ago
Did we read the same Wikipedia page? It doesn't say the word "failed" anywhere on it.
- tadfisher 9mo ago
  > By 2024, Project Natick had been inactive for several years, though it was referenced in media as though it was ongoing. That year, Microsoft confirmed that the project was inactive and that it had no servers underwater. I wouldn't exactly call this a success, for that matter.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    To me, failed, implies some sort of real failure, not just, "eh, won't make us enough money" a la Google/business since forever/the exec who's pet project it was moved on/had babies/was fired for unrelated reasons/some other human thing unrelated to the technical proposition. If, like, sea-water entered and corroded the system and it blew up and ate babies, and caused Godzilla, that would be a failure. It just being not quite interesting enough to go after seems... I mean I guess it is, but on a "meh" level.
    - AlexandrB 9mo ago
      "eh, won't make us enough money" would make space data centres a failure too. The whole point is to do compute more cheaply than a traditional data centre.

mlyle 9mo ago

You also have to get rid of waste heat :P

c22 9mo ago

How many submerged datacenters is Microsoft operating?

baking 9mo ago
Zero.
iceboundrock 9mo ago
None, https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-confirms-project-natick-underwater-data-center-is-no-more/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-confirm...

camdenreslink 9mo ago

But you could just run a “zero maintenance” data center on Earth and not pay to blast it into orbit.

MagicMoonlight 9mo ago

But if we’re going down that line of thinking then it’s a poor comparison. I could open a data centre on the ground and use the same principle of zero maintenance, and it would be way cheaper and way more powerful.