5 ms·

Their goal of moving compute to space combined with their capacity to launch tons of payload will make this look like a tiny blip.

by repple 7mo ago

Marazan 7mo ago
What is the benefit of "moving compute to space"?
- layer8 7mo ago
  That xAI fails faster, hopefully.
- kybernetikos 7mo ago
  It's hard for an uprising of poor people to shut it off. It's the ideal place to run your CEO / President simulations. I say this tongue in cheek, but in all seriousness, I can't really think of any other benefit, and I no longer have a lot of faith in the good sense of some of the people involved.
  - vessenes 7mo ago
    Elon makes a relatively good case in the Dwarkesh podcast. I recall it like this: 1) Energy infra is going to be seriously limited on the production side well, well below demand 2) energy engineering solar for space requires less materials than for gravity-based solar (!) 3) you cut out distribution network needs when you just launch stuff all per-pod in space 4) SpaceX thinks it can create a scalable vertically integrated production facility to turn raw materials into space datacenter pods, with the exception of chips. As a business bet, this is predicated on 10,000x inference demand growth - if we have that, and SpaceX can get the integrated production rolling, and get Starship launching, then these will be actively utilized at scale. Whether you are bullish on the whole plan should, I think come down to your take on those priors: 10kx growth, ability to manage supply chain and production, Starship outlook, and silicon access. I'm not bearish on this after listening to the podcast; it has a very Elon-like returns distribution - if they're wrong on a lot of this, they'll probably have some moderately price-competitive datacenter facilities in space and a lot of built organizational knowhow while Brooklyn journalists dunk on them for spending all that effort to just replicate what we have on Earth. If they're right about most of this, they'll have an unreplicable head start, both due to years of experience, and due to the cheap launch they gambled on ten years ago, they'll have a nearly insurmountable moat.
    - kybernetikos 7mo ago
      Everything relating to a datacentre that you can do in space you can do more easily on earth, regardless of 10,000x inference growth or supply chain or production or starship or silicon. I just don't think you can be cost competitive with earth bound data centres if 'protected from the poors' isn't a selling point. By the way, 10,000x inference growth would look like what happened with cryptocurrency mining - after a couple of years, you'd be needing to upgrade all your machines with ASICs and the market would be flooded with very cheap graphics cards. I doubt that upgrading space data centres would be fun.
      - vessenes 7mo ago
        Zoning is one area that’s better in space. And power density for solar is another. I don’t get your mining analogy though - a non upgradable data center pod is either going to pay off its capital costs or it won’t. Once it has, any revenue is close to 100% profit. 10k demand increase is the opposite of mining dynamics: there you get a 10k supply increase that the price has to support, in combination with more efficient silicon. Here the demand drives revenue and earnings. If there’s some crazy inflection point in chips then you’ll still have all the power infra in space - you can just like cut the old pod and hook up a new one: or more likely manufacturing economies of scale mean you probably just keep sending up new systems and put the old ones on work loads they can manage at market prices.
        deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
        CamperBob2 7mo ago
        Zoning is one area that’s better in space. Not really, though? The idea that Earth-based data centers need to be built in populated, developed areas is indeed dumb, yet it seems to be inexplicably baked into everyone's assumptions. In particular, the small discrete data centers that Musk wants to launch could go anywhere on Earth. They could be powered by local PV arrays and batteries, they can be cooled by smaller radiators than they would need to use in space, and they could be networked via Starlink or something very much like it, just as they would need to be networked in space. There's nothing special about space, it just costs more to get there. If he wants them to be out of reach of governments, why not put them on container ships in international waters? There are thousands at sea at any given time, and I'm sure their operators would be happy to rent them out. Hell, put them on dirigibles that just drift around in international airspace for months at a time. Anywhere but space. And power density for solar is another. Does power density matter in terrestrial solar applications? If so, why? These things can and should be deployed in oceans, deserts, and trackless wastelands. Who cares how big the solar panels are?
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
  > What is the benefit of "moving compute to space"? I’ll bite. It’s cheaper and quicker to permit a launch than permit, zone and interconnect a datacenter. And solar panels in space don’t need glass cladding, which makes them cheaper to make and lift. The downside is launch cost. But there is a breakeven between these factors that seems to have most of its error bars within Starship’s target. (By my math, around $35/kg.) So if Starship works, and all indications seem to show that it will, eventually, then that puts space-based data centers at cost parity with terrestrial ones within a decade. Which was, well, unexpected when I ran the numbers. (The surprising finding when you run the numbers is launching the chips and solar panels isn’t the limiter, it’s launching the radiators. Which opens up whole new questions about at what scale it makes sense to stop sending those up the well.)
  - danenania 7mo ago
    What about maintenance? I’d naively assume that’s the killer.
    - JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
      > What about maintenance? Simply put, you don’t. Your DC is launched into its graveyard. If a chip burns out it burns out—maybe rack design is a bit more redundant to keep failures as independent as possible. Maybe at some point repair is a valid optimization. But it’s not necessary for an MVP, namely, one that is competitive against 3 to 5-year terrestrial delays and sub-10% costs of capital for such projects. That’s what has surprised me.
      - danenania 7mo ago
        It seems like that could change the math quite a bit, since you’d presumably be losing a lot of capacity to failures. I’d assume you would have a much higher failure rate in space, and component failure is already pretty common on earth.
  - skywhopper 7mo ago
    The capacity of a single datacenter would require thousands of launches to get the equipment into space. I don’t believe for a second that this would be easier in any way. Cooling and bandwidth are also completely unsolved for compute on a useful scale.
- Fricken 7mo ago
  Here's an explainer video: https://youtu.be/Jth4yATniS4?si=zIzZXwLk6RTgyeCQ&t=37 https://youtu.be/Jth4yATniS4?si=zIzZXwLk6RTgyeCQ&t=37
- ActorNightly 7mo ago
  Not having to deal with having to defend in court why polluting an area where you built your datacenter and fucking it up for the residents there is actually better for all man kind.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

Their goal of moving compute to space combined with their capacity to launch tons of payload will make this look like a tiny blip.

by repple 7mo ago

Their goal of moving compute to space combined with their capacity to launch tons of payload will make this look like a tiny blip.

Marazan 7mo ago

What is the benefit of "moving compute to space"?

layer8 7mo ago
That xAI fails faster, hopefully.
kybernetikos 7mo ago
It's hard for an uprising of poor people to shut it off. It's the ideal place to run your CEO / President simulations. I say this tongue in cheek, but in all seriousness, I can't really think of any other benefit, and I no longer have a lot of faith in the good sense of some of the people involved.
- vessenes 7mo ago
  Elon makes a relatively good case in the Dwarkesh podcast. I recall it like this: 1) Energy infra is going to be seriously limited on the production side well, well below demand 2) energy engineering solar for space requires less materials than for gravity-based solar (!) 3) you cut out distribution network needs when you just launch stuff all per-pod in space 4) SpaceX thinks it can create a scalable vertically integrated production facility to turn raw materials into space datacenter pods, with the exception of chips. As a business bet, this is predicated on 10,000x inference demand growth - if we have that, and SpaceX can get the integrated production rolling, and get Starship launching, then these will be actively utilized at scale. Whether you are bullish on the whole plan should, I think come down to your take on those priors: 10kx growth, ability to manage supply chain and production, Starship outlook, and silicon access. I'm not bearish on this after listening to the podcast; it has a very Elon-like returns distribution - if they're wrong on a lot of this, they'll probably have some moderately price-competitive datacenter facilities in space and a lot of built organizational knowhow while Brooklyn journalists dunk on them for spending all that effort to just replicate what we have on Earth. If they're right about most of this, they'll have an unreplicable head start, both due to years of experience, and due to the cheap launch they gambled on ten years ago, they'll have a nearly insurmountable moat.
  - kybernetikos 7mo ago
    Everything relating to a datacentre that you can do in space you can do more easily on earth, regardless of 10,000x inference growth or supply chain or production or starship or silicon. I just don't think you can be cost competitive with earth bound data centres if 'protected from the poors' isn't a selling point. By the way, 10,000x inference growth would look like what happened with cryptocurrency mining - after a couple of years, you'd be needing to upgrade all your machines with ASICs and the market would be flooded with very cheap graphics cards. I doubt that upgrading space data centres would be fun.
    - vessenes 7mo ago
      Zoning is one area that’s better in space. And power density for solar is another. I don’t get your mining analogy though - a non upgradable data center pod is either going to pay off its capital costs or it won’t. Once it has, any revenue is close to 100% profit. 10k demand increase is the opposite of mining dynamics: there you get a 10k supply increase that the price has to support, in combination with more efficient silicon. Here the demand drives revenue and earnings. If there’s some crazy inflection point in chips then you’ll still have all the power infra in space - you can just like cut the old pod and hook up a new one: or more likely manufacturing economies of scale mean you probably just keep sending up new systems and put the old ones on work loads they can manage at market prices.
      - deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
      - CamperBob2 7mo ago
        Zoning is one area that’s better in space. Not really, though? The idea that Earth-based data centers need to be built in populated, developed areas is indeed dumb, yet it seems to be inexplicably baked into everyone's assumptions. In particular, the small discrete data centers that Musk wants to launch could go anywhere on Earth. They could be powered by local PV arrays and batteries, they can be cooled by smaller radiators than they would need to use in space, and they could be networked via Starlink or something very much like it, just as they would need to be networked in space. There's nothing special about space, it just costs more to get there. If he wants them to be out of reach of governments, why not put them on container ships in international waters? There are thousands at sea at any given time, and I'm sure their operators would be happy to rent them out. Hell, put them on dirigibles that just drift around in international airspace for months at a time. Anywhere but space. And power density for solar is another. Does power density matter in terrestrial solar applications? If so, why? These things can and should be deployed in oceans, deserts, and trackless wastelands. Who cares how big the solar panels are?
JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
> What is the benefit of "moving compute to space"? I’ll bite. It’s cheaper and quicker to permit a launch than permit, zone and interconnect a datacenter. And solar panels in space don’t need glass cladding, which makes them cheaper to make and lift. The downside is launch cost. But there is a breakeven between these factors that seems to have most of its error bars within Starship’s target. (By my math, around $35/kg.) So if Starship works, and all indications seem to show that it will, eventually, then that puts space-based data centers at cost parity with terrestrial ones within a decade. Which was, well, unexpected when I ran the numbers. (The surprising finding when you run the numbers is launching the chips and solar panels isn’t the limiter, it’s launching the radiators. Which opens up whole new questions about at what scale it makes sense to stop sending those up the well.)
- danenania 7mo ago
  What about maintenance? I’d naively assume that’s the killer.
  - JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
    > What about maintenance? Simply put, you don’t. Your DC is launched into its graveyard. If a chip burns out it burns out—maybe rack design is a bit more redundant to keep failures as independent as possible. Maybe at some point repair is a valid optimization. But it’s not necessary for an MVP, namely, one that is competitive against 3 to 5-year terrestrial delays and sub-10% costs of capital for such projects. That’s what has surprised me.
    - danenania 7mo ago
      It seems like that could change the math quite a bit, since you’d presumably be losing a lot of capacity to failures. I’d assume you would have a much higher failure rate in space, and component failure is already pretty common on earth.
- skywhopper 7mo ago
  The capacity of a single datacenter would require thousands of launches to get the equipment into space. I don’t believe for a second that this would be easier in any way. Cooling and bandwidth are also completely unsolved for compute on a useful scale.
Fricken 7mo ago
Here's an explainer video: https://youtu.be/Jth4yATniS4?si=zIzZXwLk6RTgyeCQ&t=37 https://youtu.be/Jth4yATniS4?si=zIzZXwLk6RTgyeCQ&t=37
ActorNightly 7mo ago
Not having to deal with having to defend in court why polluting an area where you built your datacenter and fucking it up for the residents there is actually better for all man kind.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]