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Why would it ever be more economical to put datacenters in orbit, rather than on some dirt cheap land?
by H8crilA 5mo ago
Why would it ever be more economical to put datacenters in orbit, rather than on some dirt cheap land?
- readthenotes1 5mo agoBecause dirt cheap land usually does not have dirt, cheap water or dirt cheap electricity.
- jordanb 5mo agoWater in orbit: famously cheap.
- ACCount37 5mo agoAh yes: computation. Famous for annihilating water. Every bit you flip consumes an H2O molecule.
- kennywinker 5mo agoWell, how do you cool servers in space then? Evaporative cooling is the way it happens down on earth - and that shuttles h2o molecules from dense useful clumps like aquifers and rivers to a less useful form spread out in the air. But evaporating h2o isn’t an option in space afaik - since there’s a shortage of air to take up the h2o. In fact I think radiative cooling is the only actual option in space.
- MrMorden 5mo agoThat's the neat thing: you don't, or at least not in the megawatt range. A kilowatt can be done with radiative cooling but doesn't get you far with a hypothetical datacenter satellite.
- kennywinker 5mo agoSo, somehow the servers can run hot in space without a problem?
- MrMorden 5mo agoNo; if you try to do this you don't launch in the first place because the amount of servers required to be useful can't be cooled within your payload budget.
- kennywinker 5mo agoIt seems like you are agreeing with me while sounding like you’re arguing with me… confusing.
- ACCount37 5mo agoRadiative cooling. When something gets hot, it begins to radiate that heat away - black body radiation. Fucking hell - do you all think ISS is cooled by hopes and prayers? Starlink V3 sats have to dump ~20kW of pure waste heat just to exist. Going from that to the stated 100kW is an engineering task, not some sort of impossible arcane rite.
- kennywinker 5mo agoThe ISS isn’t supposed to be a profitable business, and it isn’t competing with terrestrial ISS’ that can use evaporative cooling.
- etc-hosts 5mo agoMy job is mostly worrying about cooling paths, maintenance, power, heat transfer, lifetime of GPUs, and high performance networks. NVIDIA partner. I can drive to the datacenter. This stuff BARELY works here on Earth. Especially thermal issues. Looking forward to watching spacex defeat physics.
- ACCount37 5mo agoSkill issue. Starlink V3 bus already has to dispose of ~20kW of waste heat from the electronics - because RF amps aren't that great at what they do. That's a ~2020 server rack, in SPACE. Going from that to a 2026 server rack is engineering, not magic.
- newsclues 5mo agoThe data link between earth and space has so much bandwidth. There are sensors in space that send data to earth it gets processed and then the data is sent back to space then to the end user back on earth. If you do the compute in space you save the space-earth transfer time twice. Latency and availability of bandwidth are both factors. There may be limited utility for this outside of military.
- ACCount37 5mo agoThere are no NIMBYs in space. No government permitting on land use. And solar power is plentiful. It's like having a dollar store Dyson sphere. Making use of that is predicated entirely on being able to put a lot of hardware into space cheaply. SpaceX is the undisputed best at that, no one comes close. The question is whether their "best" is good enough to make space datacenters economical.
- kklisura 5mo agoBut you don't have to build it in someone's _backyard_, just build it in a middle of nowhere.
- polski-g 5mo agoThat's literally what datacenter in Utah was and it still had a horde of retards complaining.
- delichon 5mo agoThere are many Not In My Orbit people on this very page. Many current national politicians would be happy to vote AI out of orbit today. Space is not an escape from earthly politics.
- marcosdumay 5mo ago> Space is not an escape from earthly politics. Well, Earth orbit isn't.
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- dgellow 5mo agoThat won’t ever be the case. It’s pure grift. There is literally no other actual reason
- inglor_cz 5mo agoI am surprised how many people say that there is no reason to put data centers in orbit, when, at the same time, data centers are becoming the hated thing du jour all over the US and politicians left and right (but mostly left-of-center) are touting bans and restrictions to their electorates. It is definitely to escape most political pressures on Earth. They will never be able to sidestep the US feds, but aside from an open war with China or Russia, all other authorities are out of the game when it comes to space.
- XorNot 5mo agoPeople don't want to live near data centers. But companies find it logistically cheaper and easier to keep proposing to build them near existing towns and infrastructure, and then deal with regulatory fights rather then picking an isolated area and running an extension of high voltage lines out to them. Which tells you something about why space data centers makes no sense.
- inglor_cz 5mo ago"rather then picking an isolated area and running an extension of high voltage lines out to them." Does not this usually mean extending/upgrading roads and other infrastructure as well? IDK how this works in the US, but in most of Europe, a "linear" project like this, which crosses multiple jurisdictions, usually runs into more resistance, not less. The multitude of people and special interests along the line compounds. In some places, special legislation has been enacted that exempts such linear projects from detailed review and opposition, otherwise pipelines, grid upgrades etc. would stall for decades in courts.