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It's exiting the 5th best social network and the 10th (or worse) best AI company and selling them to a decent company. It probably increases Elon's share of th
by lancewiggs 8mo ago
It's exiting the 5th best social network and the 10th (or worse) best AI company and selling them to a decent company.
It probably increases Elon's share of the combined entity.
It delivers on a promise to investors that he will make money for them, even as the underlying businesses are lousy.
- ojbyrne 8mo agoPlus government backstop. The federal government (especially the current one) is not going to let SpaceX fail.
- mullingitover 8mo agoMaybe not, but they might force it to sell at fire sale prices to another aerospace company that doesn't have the baggage.
- gpt5 8mo agoI'm confused about the level of conversation here. Can we actually run the math on heat dissipation and feasibility? A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate. There are around 10K starlink satellites already in orbit, which means that the Starlink constellation is already effectively equivalent to a 50 Mega-watt (in a rough, back of the envelope feasibility way). Isn't 50MW already by itself equivalent to the energy consumption of a typical hyperscaler cloud? Why is starlink possible and other computations are not? Starlink is also already financially viable. Wouldn't it also become significantly cheaper as we improve our orbital launch vehicles?
- space_fountain 8mo agoIt's like this. Everything about operating a datacenter in space is more difficult than it is to operate one on earth. 1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit 2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low 3. Refurbishment is next to impossible 4. Networking is harder, either you are ok with a relatively small datacenter or you have to deal with radio or laser links between satellites For starlink this isn't as important. Starlink provides something that can't really be provided any other way, but even so just the US uses 176 terawatt-hours of power for data centers so starlink is 1/400th of that assuming your estimate is accurate (and I'm not sure it is, does it account for the night cycle?)
- murderfs 8mo ago> The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean...
- sanex 8mo agoOr maybe they want to just use them hard and deorbit them after three yesrs?
- JumpCrisscross 8mo ago> Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean Hell, you're going to lose some fraction of chips to entropy every year. What if you could process those into reaction mass?
- falcor84 8mo agoThis brings a whole new dimension to that joke about how our software used to leak memory, then file descriptors, then ec2 instances, and soon we'll be leaking entire data centers. So essentially you're saying - let's convert this into a feature.
- lambdaone 8mo agoIt's certainly one way to do arena-based garbage collection.
- 3eb7988a1663 8mo agoI believe that a modern GPU will burn out immediately. Chips for space are using ancient process nodes with chunky sized components so that they are more resilient to radiation. Deploying a 3nm process into space seems unlikely to work unless you surround it with a foot of lead.
- tw04 8mo agoAmazon’s new campus in Indiana is expected to use 2.2GW when complete. 50Mw is nothing, and that’s ignoring the fact that most of that power wouldn't actually be used for compute.
- Aurornis 8mo ago> Isn't 50MW already by itself equivalent to the energy consumption of a typical hyperscaler cloud? xAI’s first data center buildout was in the 300MW range and their second is in the Gigawatt range. There are planned buildouts from other companies even bigger than that. So data center buildouts in the AI era need 1-2 orders of magnitude more power and cooling than your 50MW estimate. Even a single NVL72 rack, just one rack, needs 120kW.
- hirsin 8mo agoSimply put no, 50MW is not the typical hyperscaler cloud size. It's not even the typical single datacenter size. A single AI rack consumes 60kW, and there is apparently a single DC that alone consumes 650MW. When Microsoft puts in a DC, the machines are done in units of a "stamp", ie a couple racks together. These aren't scaled by dollar or sqft, but by the MW. And on top of that... That's a bunch of satellites not even trying to crunch data at top speed. No where near the right order of magnitude.
- tensor 8mo agoHow much of that power is radiated as the radio waves it sends?
- adgjlsfhk1 8mo agothe majority is likely in radio waves and the inter satellite laser communication
- hirsin 8mo agoGood point - the comms satellites are not even "keeping" some of the energy, while a DC would. I _am_ now curious about the connection between bandwidth and wattage, but I'm willing to bet that less than 1% of the total energy dissipation on one of these DC satellites would be in the form of satellite-to-earth broadcast (keeping in mind that s2s broadcast would presumably be something of a wash).
- markhahn 8mo ago50MW is on the small side for an AI cluster - probably less than 50k gpus. if the current satellite model dissipates 5kW, you can't just add a GPU (+1kW). maybe removing most of the downlink stuff lets you put in 2 GPUs? so if you had 10k of these, you'd have a pretty high-latency cluster of 20k GPUs. I'm not saying I'd turn down free access to it, but it's also very cracked. you know, sort of Howard Hughesy.
- hackernudes 8mo agoHigh latency to earth but low latency (potentially) to other satellites.
- javascriptfan69 8mo agoStarlink provides a service that couldn't exist without the satellite infrastructure. Datacenters already exist. Putting datacenters in space does not offer any new capabilities.
- _fizz_buzz_ 8mo agoThis is the main point I think. I am very much convinced that SpaceX is capbable to put a datacenter into space. I am not convinced they can do it cheaper than building a datacenter on earth.
- notahacker 8mo agoI would be a lot more convinced they had found a way to solve the unit economics if it was being used to secure billion dollar deposits from other companies rather than as the narrative for rolling a couple of Elon's loss making companies into SpaceX and IPOing...
- adgjlsfhk1 8mo ago> A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate. This isn't quite true. It's very possible that the majority of that power is going into the antennas/lasers which technically means that the energy is being dissipated, but it never became heat in the first place. Also, 5KW solar power likely only means ~3kw of actual electrical consumption (you will over-provision a bit both for when you're behind the earth and also just for safety margin).
- gclawes 8mo agoStarlink satellites also radiate a non-trivial amount of the energy they consume from their phased arrays
- antonvs 8mo ago> Why is starlink possible and other computations are not? Aside from the point others have made that 50 MW is small in the context of hyperscalers, if you want to do things like SOTA LLM training, you can't feasibly do it with large numbers of small devices. Density is key because of latency - you need the nodes to be in close physical proximity to communicate with each other at very high speeds. For training an LLM, you're ideally going to want individual satellites with power delivery on the order of at least about 20 MW, and that's just for training previous-generation SOTA models. That's nearly 5,000 times more power than a single current Starlink satellite, and nearly 300 times that of the ISS. You'd need radiator areas in the range of tens of thousands of square meters to handle that. Is it theoretically technically possible? Sure. But it's a long-term project, the kind of thing that Musk will say takes "5 years" that will actually take many decades. And making it economically viable is another story - the OP article points out other issues with that, such as handling hardware upgrades. Starlink's current model relies on many cheap satellites - the equation changes when each one is going to be very, very expensive, large, and difficult to deploy.
- kristjansson 8mo ago50MW might be one aisle of a really dense DC. A single rack might draw 120kW.
- pdpi 8mo ago5kW means you can't even handle a single one of these[0], compared to a handful per rack on an earthbound data centre. 0. https://www.arccompute.io/solutions/hardware/gpu-servers/supermicro-hgx-h200-gpu-server https://www.arccompute.io/solutions/hardware/gpu-servers/sup...
- MadnessASAP 8mo agoI ran the math the last time this topic camps up The short answer is that ~100m2 of steel plate at 1400C (just below its melting point) will shed 50MW of power in black body radiation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087616#46093316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087616#46093316
- ViewTrick1002 8mo agoWhich GPU runs at 1400C?
- MadnessASAP 8mo agoOne made of steel presumably. I would assume such a setup involves multiple stages of heat pumps to from GPU to 1400C radiatoe. Obviously that's going to impact efficiency. Also I'm not seriously suggesting that 1400C radiators is a reasonable approach to cooling a space data centre. It's just intended to demonstrate how infeasible the idea is.
- adrian_b 8mo agoThe idea of using heat pumps to increase the temperature of the radiator is unlikely to allow an increase of the fraction of the original amount of heat that is radiated per heatsink surface, i.e. the added heat may be higher than the additionally radiated heat, though I am too lazy to compute now whether this is possible. Moreover, a heat pump would add an equipment with moving parts that can fail, requiring maintenance.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- adrian_b 8mo agoThe temperature of space datacenters will be limited to 100 Celsius degrees, because otherwise the electronic equipment will be destroyed. So your huge metal plate would radiate (1673/374)^4 = 400 times less heat, i.e. only 125 kW. In reality, it would radiate much less than that, even if made of copper or silver covered with Vantablack, because the limited thermal conductivity will reduce the temperature for the parts distant from the body.
- phs318u 8mo agoBecause 10K satellites have a FAR greater combined surface area than a single space-borne DC would. Stefan-Boltzman law: ability to radiate heat increase to the 4th power of surface area.
- thebolt00 8mo agoIt's linear to surface area, but 4th power to temperature.
- dguest 8mo agoAlso worth noting that if computing power scales with volume then surface area (and thus radiation) scales like p^2/3. In other words, for a fixed geometry, the required heat dissipation per unit area goes like p^1/3. This is why smaller things can just dissipate heat from their surface, whereas larger things require active cooling. I'm not a space engineer but I'd imagine that smaller satellites can make due with a lot of passive cooling on the exterior of the housing, whereas a shopping-mall sized computer in space would will require a lot of extra plumbing.
- phs318u 8mo agoThanks for the correction. Last time I looked at it was in 2nd year Thermodynamics in 1985.
- padjo 8mo agoAre starlink satellites in sun synchronous orbits? Doesn't constant solar heating change the energy balance quite a bit?
- cjfd 8mo agoSure, we can run the math on heat dissipation. The law of Stefan-Boltzman is free and open source and it application is high school level physics. You talk about 50 MW. You are going to need a lot of surface area to radiate that off at somewhere close to reasonable temperatures.
- ndsipa_pomu 8mo ago> The law of Stefan-Boltzman is free and open source... What do you mean by "open source"? Can we contribute changes to it?
- PurpleRamen 8mo agoA Starlink satellite is mainly just receiving and sending data, the bare minimum of a data center-satellite's abilities; everything else comes on top and would be the real power drain.
- Sharlin 8mo agoSquare–cube law.
- michaelmrose 8mo agoWhy would anyone think the unit cost would be competitive with cheap power / land on earth? If that doesn't make sense how could anything else?
- chairmansteve 8mo agoA typical desktop/tower PC will consume 400 watts. So 12 PC's equals 1 starlink satellite. A single server in a data center will consume 5-10 kW.
- kimixa 8mo agoOutput from radiating heat scales with area it can dissipate from. Lots of small satellites have a much higher ratio than fewer larger satellites. Cooling 10k separate objects is orders of magnitude easier than 10 objects at 1000x the power use, even if the total power output is the same. Distributing useful work over so many small objects is a very hard problem, and not even shown to be possible at useful scales for many of the things AI datacenters are doing today. And that's with direct cables - using wireless communication means even less bandwidth between nodes, more noise as the number of nodes grows, and significantly higher power use and complexity for the communication in the first place. Building data centres in the middle of the sahara desert is still much better in pretty much every metric than in space, be it price, performance, maintainance, efficiency, ease of cooling, pollution/"trash" disposal etc. Even things like communication network connectivity would be easier, as at the amounts of money this constellation mesh would cost you could lay new fibre optic cables to build an entire new global network to anywhere on earth and have new trunk connections to every major hub. There are advantages to being in space - normally around increased visibility for wireless signals, allowing great distances to be covered at (relatively) low bandwidth. But that comes at an extreme cost. Paying that cost for a use case that simply doesn't get much advantages from those benefits is nonsense.
- sandworm101 8mo agoWhatever sat datacenter they biuld, it would run better/easier/faster/cheaper sitting on the ground in antarctica than it would in space, or floating on the ocean, without the launch costs. Space is useful for those activities that can only be done from space. For general computing? Not until all the empty parts of the globe are full. This is a pump-and-dump bid for investor money. They will line up to give it to him.
- krisoft 8mo ago> Whatever sat datacenter they biuld, it will run better/easier/faster/cheaper sitting on the ground in antarctica than it will in space That is clearly not true. How do you power the data center on antarctica? May i remind you it will be in the shadow of earth for half a year.
- ErroneousBosh 8mo ago> A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power Is that 5kW of electrical power input at the terminals, or 5kW irradiation onto the panels? Because that sounds like kind of a lot, for something the size of a fridge.
- rootnod3 8mo agoForget heat. Replacing disks alone is a deal breaker on that one.
- jdhwosnhw 8mo ago> A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate. The “+ solar power” part is the majority of the energy. Solar panel efficiency is only about 25-30% at beginning-of-life whereas typical albedos are effectively 100%. So your estimate is off by at least a factor of three. Also, I’m not sure where you got 5 kw from. The area of the satellite is ~100 m2, which means they are intercepting over 100 kw of bolometric solar power.
- whiplash451 8mo agoNot related to heat, but a com satellite is built from extremely durable HW/SW that's been battle-tested to run flawlessly over years with massive MTBF numbers. A data center is nowhere near that and requires constant physical interventions. How do they suggest to address this?
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- TurdF3rguson 8mo ago> 10th (or worse) best AI company You might only care about coding models, but text is dominating the market share right now and Grok is the #2 model for that in arena rankings.
- adventured 8mo agoGrok is losing pretty spectacularly on the user / subscriber side of things. They have no path to paying for their existence unless they drastically increase usage. There aren't going to be very many big winners in this segment and xAI's expenses are really really big.
- EdwardDiego 8mo agoI really wonder what will happen when the AI companies can no longer set fire to piles of investor money, and have to transition to profitability or at least revenue neutrality - as that would entail dramatically increasing prices. Is the plan to have everyone so hopelessly dependent on their product that they grit their teeth and keep on paying?
- adventured 8mo agoIt'll be a combination of advertising and subscription fees, and there will only be a few big winners. Gemini is practically guaranteed. With the ad model already primed, their financial resources, their traffic to endlessly promote Gemini (ala Chrome), their R&D capabilities around AI, their own chips, crazy access to training data, and so on - they'd have to pull the ultimate goof to mess up here. Microsoft is toast, short of a miracle. I'd bet against Office and Windows here. As Office goes down, it's going to take Windows down with it. The great Office moat is about to end. The company struggles, the stock struggles, Azure gets spun off (unlock value, institutional pressure), Office + Windows get spun off - the company splits into pieces. The LLMs are an inflection point for Office and Microsoft is super at risk, backwards regarding AI and they're slow. The OpenAI pursuit as it was done, was a gigantic mistake for Microsoft - one of the dumbest strategies in the history of tech, it left them with their pants down. Altman may have killed a king by getting him to be complacent. Grok is very unlikely to make it (as is). The merger with SpaceX guarantees its death as a competitor to GPT/Gemini/Claude, it's over. Maybe they'll turn Grok into something useful to SpaceX. More likely they'll slip behind and it'll die rapidly like Llama. The merger is because they see the writing on the wall, this is a bailout to the investors (not named Elon) of xAI, as the forced Twitter rollup was a bailout for the investors of Twitter. Claude is in a weird spot. What they have is not worth $300-$500 billion. Can they figure out how to build a lot more value out of what they have today (and get their finances sustainable), before the clock runs out? Or do they get purchased by Meta, Microsoft, etc. OpenAI has to rapidly roll out the advertising model and get the burn rate down to meaningless levels, so they're no longer dependent on capital markets for financing (that party is going to end suddenly). Meta is permanently on the outside looking in. They will never field an in-house competitor to GPT or Gemini that can persistently keep up. Meta doesn't know what it is or why it should be trying to compete with GPT/Gemini/Claude. Their failure (at this) is already guaranteed. They should just acquire GPT 4o and let their aging userbase on FB endlessly talk itself into the grave for the next 30 years while clicking ads. If Amazon knew what they were doing (they don't right now), they would: immediately split retail + ads and AWS. The ad business ensures that the retail business will continue to thrive and would be highly lucrative. Then have AWS purchase Anthropic when valuations drop, bolt it on to AWS everything. Far less of an anti-trust issue than if what is presently known as Amazon attempted it here and now. Anthropic needs to build a lot on to itself to sustain itself and justify its valuation, AWS already has the answer to that. If valuations plunge, and OpenAI is not yet sustainable, Microsoft should split itself into pieces and have the Windows-Office division purchase OpenAI as their AI option. It'd be their only path to avoiding anti-trust blocking that acquisition. As is Microsoft would not be allowed to buy OpenAI. Alternatively Microsoft can take a shot at acquiring Anthropic at some point - this seems likely given the internal usage going on at Redmond, the primary question is anti-trust (but in this case, Anthropic is viewed as the #3, so Microsoft would argue it bolsters competition with GPT & Gemini).
- stogot 8mo agoxAI includes twitter? I thought twitter was just X?
- 7bees 8mo agoxAI acquired twitter in 2025 as part of Musk's financial shell game (probably the same game he is playing with SpaceX/xAI now).
- chairmansteve 8mo agoElon's always looking for another Brooklyn Bridge to sell to the rubes...
- Vaslo 8mo agoSounds like Elon hurt someone’s feelings