4 ms·

Because of the Musk reality distortion field. The claim is that all data centers will move into space, and that SpaceX will completely own that market.

UltraSane 5mo ago
I truly do not understand why anyone believes anything Musk says anymore.
- bar000n 5mo ago
  could it be that those people don't actually believe him and just appreciate the genuine shit-show he puts up enabling them to laugh at people who get sad about what he says, and their eagerness to believe
  - Forgeties79 5mo ago
    “Pretending” to be a fan of a troll because he tries to troll people who think he’s a troll is a good thing…?
Izmaki 5mo ago
This sounds amazing until something needs replacement. Until data centers on earth has a 99.99% (or higher) level of autonomous operation with very minimal requirements to maintenance and part replacements, they're not sending anything into orbit...
- eigenspace 5mo ago
  I also sounds amazing until you remember how hard it is to cool something when your only option is radiative cooling.
  - Drakim 5mo ago
    You could also transfer the heat to tungsten rods and drop them on rivaling earth-bound data centers.
    - kergonath 5mo ago
      Why tungsten? In terms of thermal conductivity, It’s way worse than silver and copper and on par with good aluminium alloys. Those are cheaper and much lighter (so again much cheaper to put into orbit).
      - eigenspace 5mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment The idea is to use tungsten because of the high melting point and hardness so that it survives re-entry in order to best strike the rival datacentre.
        kergonath 5mo ago
        This has zero advantage over drones or ICBMs. It’s a joke, a Cold War fever dream.
        eigenspace 5mo ago
        It was a joke, but now it's a totally serious proposal because it can help with heat dissipation in orbital datacenters. Very serious. No joking here.
      - deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
- raincole 5mo ago
  It sounds amazing for 14yo boys who are not specifically into hard sci-fi.
  - sebzim4500 5mo ago
    I guess we'll see, because most 14 year olds don't have a lot of money to put into SpaceX.
    - vkou 5mo ago
      'Stock goes up so we buy it' has sufficient explanatory power to resolve this conundrum.
- flyinglizard 5mo ago
  [dead]
- kortilla 5mo ago
  Starlink already operates this way. You don’t replace parts, you launch new sats.
sgt 5mo ago
Where did they say that all data centers will move into space? I thought the claim was that it's going to be more and more feasible and profitable to have DC's in space.
- Gomotono 5mo ago
  Elon Musk is saying this together with Dyson Sphere and Mars colonisation. In his FCC filling he also mentions DCs: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-26-113A1.pdf https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-26-113A1.pdf And yes its absolutly wild. His Scifi ideas are probably a min of 100 years too early. And while he doesn't even need his own compute (renting out colossus 1 and 2), he thinks we will send server racks full of expensive hardware into space in no time. Why? Because his Space-X Trillion evaluation doesn't make sense if he doens't has payload for Starship. So how much payload do we send to space? Actually not that much, starlink itself is the biggest change by far. So he builds Starship which he needs for starlink v3 but what then? Yeah Datacenter in space...
  - sgt 5mo ago
    I doubt it'll be traditional server racks. This will be a paradigm shift, for sure. I think he's probably ahead of his time here, but that's usually how it goes.
SlinkyOnStairs 5mo ago
The datacenter thing is mostly just a meme that billionaires say because it makes them feel smart and gets them media attention, it doesn't seem to move stock significantly. The actual distortion field is around Starlink. Which is the main product and the only one that's (nominally) profitable. It's the one all the hype centers around. xAI is barely even notable in the AI space. This also makes it possible to judge the size of the distortion field, as Starlink is just an ISP, for which we have accurate valuations. And for what it concerns shareholders, a strictly worse one than a conventional ISP. Space infra is much more expenive than putting some glass in the ground, once. Comcast is a behemoth of a company doing far more than just ISP. Worth a "mere" $90 billion. Charter Communications is a similarly sized "pure" telecom. Worth $20 billion. Both of the above ISP companies have roughly 30 million subscribers. Starlink has 10 million. Yet they want $2 trillion at IPO. A 20x to 100x overvaluation. And what do you get beyond an ISP? * A private aerospace company that's not doing notably better than the space divisions of old aerospace. (Remember: Starlink is already accounted for so doesn't count here) * An AI company that has so little demand it's currently handing a bunch of compute to Anthropic for such a deep discount the latter has claimed to become profitable. * Twitter. Which is worth either $33b if you count Elon's internal buyout valuation, or $10b if you count realistic valuations. While there is some hype around "The future of space!", the reality is that the long term growth for that is fairly dead in the current geopolitical climate. Nobody's saying it out loud yet but US Aerospace is being replaced. Fewer and fewer US launches will be bought. The EU is even building their own Starlink equivalent.
- tristanj 5mo ago
  I find it amusing to read comments like these, because they remind me of the massive awareness gap between people who understand SpaceX's product line, and those who don't. In your world, you only see and interpret SpaceX's existing products. You then see SpaceX's eye-watering valuation, and then are confused where this comes from. Meanwhile, people who understand SpaceX's product line, and the implications these products in five or ten years, can analyze the situation more accurately. I can tell you are in the unaware group, since you don't mention nor analyze two of SpaceX's world-changing products (Starship and Starlink Mobile).

UltraSane 5mo ago

I truly do not understand why anyone believes anything Musk says anymore.

bar000n 5mo ago
could it be that those people don't actually believe him and just appreciate the genuine shit-show he puts up enabling them to laugh at people who get sad about what he says, and their eagerness to believe
- Forgeties79 5mo ago
  “Pretending” to be a fan of a troll because he tries to troll people who think he’s a troll is a good thing…?

Izmaki 5mo ago

This sounds amazing until something needs replacement. Until data centers on earth has a 99.99% (or higher) level of autonomous operation with very minimal requirements to maintenance and part replacements, they're not sending anything into orbit...

eigenspace 5mo ago
I also sounds amazing until you remember how hard it is to cool something when your only option is radiative cooling.
- Drakim 5mo ago
  You could also transfer the heat to tungsten rods and drop them on rivaling earth-bound data centers.
  - kergonath 5mo ago
    Why tungsten? In terms of thermal conductivity, It’s way worse than silver and copper and on par with good aluminium alloys. Those are cheaper and much lighter (so again much cheaper to put into orbit).
    - eigenspace 5mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment The idea is to use tungsten because of the high melting point and hardness so that it survives re-entry in order to best strike the rival datacentre.
      - kergonath 5mo ago
        This has zero advantage over drones or ICBMs. It’s a joke, a Cold War fever dream.
        eigenspace 5mo ago
        It was a joke, but now it's a totally serious proposal because it can help with heat dissipation in orbital datacenters. Very serious. No joking here.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
raincole 5mo ago
It sounds amazing for 14yo boys who are not specifically into hard sci-fi.
- sebzim4500 5mo ago
  I guess we'll see, because most 14 year olds don't have a lot of money to put into SpaceX.
  - vkou 5mo ago
    'Stock goes up so we buy it' has sufficient explanatory power to resolve this conundrum.
flyinglizard 5mo ago
[dead]
kortilla 5mo ago
Starlink already operates this way. You don’t replace parts, you launch new sats.

sgt 5mo ago

Where did they say that all data centers will move into space? I thought the claim was that it's going to be more and more feasible and profitable to have DC's in space.

Gomotono 5mo ago
Elon Musk is saying this together with Dyson Sphere and Mars colonisation. In his FCC filling he also mentions DCs: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-26-113A1.pdf https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-26-113A1.pdf And yes its absolutly wild. His Scifi ideas are probably a min of 100 years too early. And while he doesn't even need his own compute (renting out colossus 1 and 2), he thinks we will send server racks full of expensive hardware into space in no time. Why? Because his Space-X Trillion evaluation doesn't make sense if he doens't has payload for Starship. So how much payload do we send to space? Actually not that much, starlink itself is the biggest change by far. So he builds Starship which he needs for starlink v3 but what then? Yeah Datacenter in space...
- sgt 5mo ago
  I doubt it'll be traditional server racks. This will be a paradigm shift, for sure. I think he's probably ahead of his time here, but that's usually how it goes.

SlinkyOnStairs 5mo ago

The datacenter thing is mostly just a meme that billionaires say because it makes them feel smart and gets them media attention, it doesn't seem to move stock significantly. The actual distortion field is around Starlink. Which is the main product and the only one that's (nominally) profitable. It's the one all the hype centers around. xAI is barely even notable in the AI space. This also makes it possible to judge the size of the distortion field, as Starlink is just an ISP, for which we have accurate valuations. And for what it concerns shareholders, a strictly worse one than a conventional ISP. Space infra is much more expenive than putting some glass in the ground, once. Comcast is a behemoth of a company doing far more than just ISP. Worth a "mere" $90 billion. Charter Communications is a similarly sized "pure" telecom. Worth $20 billion. Both of the above ISP companies have roughly 30 million subscribers. Starlink has 10 million. Yet they want $2 trillion at IPO. A 20x to 100x overvaluation. And what do you get beyond an ISP? * A private aerospace company that's not doing notably better than the space divisions of old aerospace. (Remember: Starlink is already accounted for so doesn't count here) * An AI company that has so little demand it's currently handing a bunch of compute to Anthropic for such a deep discount the latter has claimed to become profitable. * Twitter. Which is worth either $33b if you count Elon's internal buyout valuation, or $10b if you count realistic valuations. While there is some hype around "The future of space!", the reality is that the long term growth for that is fairly dead in the current geopolitical climate. Nobody's saying it out loud yet but US Aerospace is being replaced. Fewer and fewer US launches will be bought. The EU is even building their own Starlink equivalent.

tristanj 5mo ago
I find it amusing to read comments like these, because they remind me of the massive awareness gap between people who understand SpaceX's product line, and those who don't. In your world, you only see and interpret SpaceX's existing products. You then see SpaceX's eye-watering valuation, and then are confused where this comes from. Meanwhile, people who understand SpaceX's product line, and the implications these products in five or ten years, can analyze the situation more accurately. I can tell you are in the unaware group, since you don't mention nor analyze two of SpaceX's world-changing products (Starship and Starlink Mobile).