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This is fairly naive, Elon isn't the only investor in SpaceX. My guess is "that they did the math" and had an engineering study which convinced them that getti

This is fairly naive, Elon isn't the only investor in SpaceX. My guess is "that they did the math" and had an engineering study which convinced them that getting AI datacenters into space will make sense. It's also not hard to imagine why, the process alone once perfected could be reused for asteroid mining for example, then mirogravity manufacturing, either of which alone would be enormous capital intensive projects. Even if AI dataenters in space are break-even it would be a massive win for SpaceX and leave their competition far behind.

javascriptfan69 8mo ago
Are you a bot or are you just stupid?
- fooker 8mo ago
  There are several other companies that have announced efforts to try data centers in space.
  - javascriptfan69 8mo ago
    I know this is hackernews and we like to get hyped up for new technologies, but, like, this just straight up isn't happening. There is no benefit to putting data centers in space versus the giant cost that you would incur by doing so. Can people please try and use their fucking brains for a second?
    - fooker 8mo ago
      > Can people please try and use their fucking brains for a second? Have you considered that people smarter than you think it is plausible?
      - javascriptfan69 8mo ago
        Have you considered that people smarter than you are scamming you?
        fooker 8mo ago
        Yep, definitely being scammed by not dismissing things outside my area of expertise out of hand. I wish I had your confidence about everything!
        javascriptfan69 8mo ago
        I am yet to see any actual numbers showing how the economics of this would work or compare to the cost of building traditional data centers. Please come back to reality.
        deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
        youarentrightjr 8mo ago
        > Yep, definitely being scammed by not dismissing things outside my area of expertise out of hand. I wish I had your confidence about everything! Instead you put your confidence in Elon, who has zero expertise in this area?
        fooker 8mo ago
        > Instead you put your confidence in Elon No, I put confidence my ability to do a web search, pretty rare skill nowadays ;) You'll see that none of these are Elon/spacex, hopefully? https://medium.com/@cognidownunder/google-just-announced-theyre-putting-data-centers-in-space-37934fe7ea84 https://medium.com/@cognidownunder/google-just-announced-the... https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/starcloud https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/starcloud https://www.informationweek.com/it-infrastructure/lunar-data-centers-loom-on-the-near-horizon https://www.informationweek.com/it-infrastructure/lunar-data... https://ascend-horizon.eu/ https://ascend-horizon.eu/ https://www.axiomspace.com/orbital-data-center https://www.axiomspace.com/orbital-data-center
      - youarentrightjr 8mo ago
        > Have you considered that people smarter than you think it is plausible? I know many people smarter than me, plenty of them who have spent careers building data centers, and not one of them think this is plausible. You should consider whether people smarter than the average investor are pulling a fast one.
        fooker 8mo ago
        Maybe we are talking about different things here? I don't doubt spacex can fail at this. I also don't doubt we are fairly close to making this plausible. > plenty of them who have spent careers building data centers Famously, plenty of people who have spent careers building rockets would swear that reusable rockets would absolutely never work.
        fluoridation 8mo ago
        >I also don't doubt we are fairly close to making this plausible. Maybe you should doubt that. There's literally no reason to think this is plausible besides some hype merchants' say-so.
        fooker 8mo ago
        > some hype merchants Excluding Spacex: Nvidia, Google, China, European Commission, Blue Origin And this being HN, a YC funded company has put a single GPU rack in space and demonstrated training a reasonable sized model on it. But yeah, it's all hype, sure.
        youarentrightjr 8mo ago
        On the off chance you're sincere and not just heavily over indexed into Elon stocks: It's trivial to understand why this is all hype if you pay attention to physics, as another commenter suggested earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law Assume you're radiating away the heat for a single B200 (~1kW), and the max radiator temp is 100C, you find A = ~3m^2. So that's 3 square meters per GPU. Now if you take into account that the largest planar structure deployed into space is ~3k m^2 (https://investors.lockheedmartin.com/news-releases/news-release-details/third-pair-massive-lockheed-martin-solar-arrays-begin-providing https://investors.lockheedmartin.com/news-releases/news-rele...), you're looking at 1000 GPUs. That's a single aisle in a terrestrial data center. Cost to deploy on earth vs satellite is left as an exercise to the reader.
- mathisfun123 8mo ago
  I often wonder that same thing about many hn commenters!

javascriptfan69 8mo ago

Are you a bot or are you just stupid?

fooker 8mo ago
There are several other companies that have announced efforts to try data centers in space.
- javascriptfan69 8mo ago
  I know this is hackernews and we like to get hyped up for new technologies, but, like, this just straight up isn't happening. There is no benefit to putting data centers in space versus the giant cost that you would incur by doing so. Can people please try and use their fucking brains for a second?
  - fooker 8mo ago
    > Can people please try and use their fucking brains for a second? Have you considered that people smarter than you think it is plausible?
    - javascriptfan69 8mo ago
      Have you considered that people smarter than you are scamming you?
      - fooker 8mo ago
        Yep, definitely being scammed by not dismissing things outside my area of expertise out of hand. I wish I had your confidence about everything!
        javascriptfan69 8mo ago
        I am yet to see any actual numbers showing how the economics of this would work or compare to the cost of building traditional data centers. Please come back to reality.
        deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
        youarentrightjr 8mo ago
        > Yep, definitely being scammed by not dismissing things outside my area of expertise out of hand. I wish I had your confidence about everything! Instead you put your confidence in Elon, who has zero expertise in this area?
        fooker 8mo ago
        > Instead you put your confidence in Elon No, I put confidence my ability to do a web search, pretty rare skill nowadays ;) You'll see that none of these are Elon/spacex, hopefully? https://medium.com/@cognidownunder/google-just-announced-theyre-putting-data-centers-in-space-37934fe7ea84 https://medium.com/@cognidownunder/google-just-announced-the... https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/starcloud https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/starcloud https://www.informationweek.com/it-infrastructure/lunar-data-centers-loom-on-the-near-horizon https://www.informationweek.com/it-infrastructure/lunar-data... https://ascend-horizon.eu/ https://ascend-horizon.eu/ https://www.axiomspace.com/orbital-data-center https://www.axiomspace.com/orbital-data-center
    - youarentrightjr 8mo ago
      > Have you considered that people smarter than you think it is plausible? I know many people smarter than me, plenty of them who have spent careers building data centers, and not one of them think this is plausible. You should consider whether people smarter than the average investor are pulling a fast one.
      - fooker 8mo ago
        Maybe we are talking about different things here? I don't doubt spacex can fail at this. I also don't doubt we are fairly close to making this plausible. > plenty of them who have spent careers building data centers Famously, plenty of people who have spent careers building rockets would swear that reusable rockets would absolutely never work.
        fluoridation 8mo ago
        >I also don't doubt we are fairly close to making this plausible. Maybe you should doubt that. There's literally no reason to think this is plausible besides some hype merchants' say-so.
        fooker 8mo ago
        > some hype merchants Excluding Spacex: Nvidia, Google, China, European Commission, Blue Origin And this being HN, a YC funded company has put a single GPU rack in space and demonstrated training a reasonable sized model on it. But yeah, it's all hype, sure.
        youarentrightjr 8mo ago
        On the off chance you're sincere and not just heavily over indexed into Elon stocks: It's trivial to understand why this is all hype if you pay attention to physics, as another commenter suggested earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law Assume you're radiating away the heat for a single B200 (~1kW), and the max radiator temp is 100C, you find A = ~3m^2. So that's 3 square meters per GPU. Now if you take into account that the largest planar structure deployed into space is ~3k m^2 (https://investors.lockheedmartin.com/news-releases/news-release-details/third-pair-massive-lockheed-martin-solar-arrays-begin-providing https://investors.lockheedmartin.com/news-releases/news-rele...), you're looking at 1000 GPUs. That's a single aisle in a terrestrial data center. Cost to deploy on earth vs satellite is left as an exercise to the reader.
mathisfun123 8mo ago
I often wonder that same thing about many hn commenters!