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100 tons is quite a lot of gpus. If they manage to solve such "minor" problems as powering and cooling them they could run for a decade or so without consuming
by ReptileMan 5mo ago
100 tons is quite a lot of gpus. If they manage to solve such "minor" problems as powering and cooling them they could run for a decade or so without consuming or polluting. The methane burned to get mass into orbit is trivial - a 500MW powerplant burns that much in under a day.
- codingdave 5mo agoYeah, that response trivializes the massive burn that power plants perform each day. When I worked in a midstream gas company, I recall a meeting when we were explaining the business to some new IT folk, and talking about the plants that process 100K barrels. One new guy in particular literally dropped his jaw and said, "you process 100K barrels of gas a year??" The room looked at him like he was insane and the woman running the meeting politely replied: "No, per day." So acting as if "it burns less than a power plant" somehow means it is trivial is just a really odd take. Besides, the methane burn is one piece of the puzzle. There is more to environmental impact than just methane.
- ReptileMan 5mo agoYes it is trivial when humanity is burning 100 million barrels of oil per day and 300 tons of coal per second and 100 tons of natural gas per second.
- vkou 5mo agoThe problem isn't GPUs the problem is cooling them. Look into what percentage of the ISS by weight is radiators, look into how little power it can generate and radiate, and you'll see that space data centers is the shitcoin pitch of 2026.
- kingleopold 5mo agoAlso they are not building them in 3D space with current tech. We clearly don't have it. Cars barely drive themselves in cities, they are decade behind building and maintaining a. datacenter in space.
- ericd 5mo agoISS is not comparable, we don't have to keep GPUs in human-habitable temp ranges, and radiation speed goes way up with increased temps.
- vkou 5mo agoThe difference in cooling rate between 290K and 370K isn't as large as you think.
- ericd 5mo agoAbout 2.6x? Making a radiator >60% smaller is a pretty big diff.
- vkou 5mo ago60% smaller than 'orders of magnitude way too bloody big to ever make a lick of sense' is still 'orders of magnitude too bloody big'. You know what makes an even bigger difference? Having a planet-sized place to dump all your waste heat into.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- toasty228 5mo ago> 100 tons is quite a lot of gpus Is it? 100 tons of gb300 rack is ~0.04% of the expected 30GW of new data centers they want to build by 2030... 100 tons of gb300 gives you a measly 10MW data center, it's not even considered a medium sized data center at that point. Not counting the hundreds of square meters of solar panels and cooling panels you'd need for each rack, you can easily multiply the total weight by 2-5x They won't run a decade or two either, the failure rate at 3 years is ~50%. And of course all of that ends up burning down and is completely un recyclable. It just doesn't make any fucking sense no matter how you look at it really.
- Zigurd 5mo agoIt won't be possible to keep the solar panels in full sunlight 100% of the time, so you need batteries too. The math don't math. Too many young dudes watched too much space opera with big heavy armored spaceships that rumble when they fly. Real space is lightweight and fragile. We don't make data centers out of that stuff.