3 ms·

now scale it ti 1 terrawatt

• Dylan16807 5mo ago
  Sure. The satellite way: we launch a hundred million big satellites (or fewer even bigger satellites). The land way: we cover 15000 square kilometers of the sahara desert in solar panels, or half-cover 30000, either way that's less than a percent of it. And some of the corners of the solar fields get turned into actual datacenter. They both sound very hard but I don't see any notable reason to favor the first one.
  • bvcp 5mo ago
    and when the sun goes out?
    • Dylan16807 5mo ago
      The number of solar panels I quoted is enough to average more than a terawatt across 24 hours. For the usage part of the equation, you need to overbuild your compute and/or have batteries. Those options are expensive but in exchange you don't need to space-proof or space-launch anything.
      • bvcp 5mo ago
        how many batteries do you need for a terrawatt of compute? do we have industry capacity to even build that much?
        • Dylan16807 5mo ago
          If you can build the solar panels and satellites, I believe in you to build the batteries. Reaching this scale is a huge problem, but 90% of the problem is shared between the different components.