10 ms·
I completely understood the idea of Starlink and expected that it would be successful and useful, which it is. I've worked in data centers for decades now, and
by jacobgold 3mo ago
I completely understood the idea of Starlink and expected that it would be successful and useful, which it is. I've worked in data centers for decades now, and I am incredibly skeptical of the "data centers in space" sales pitch. It seems like an actual scam.
Data centers submerged in the ocean or placed in the desert seem much more promising. But I have only an enthusiast's understanding of rockets and physics, so I'm genuinely open-minded to the possibility.
Is there anyone credible who thinks this is a plausible pathway for SpaceX to make huge amounts of profit?
- onli 3mo agoNo. It really is a scam. Everyone with understanding of the physics involved wrote so. Heat dissipation + radiation + launch cost make it a no-go.
- markasoftware 3mo agoHeat dissipation isn't as big a concern as it seems: the weight of the solar panels is significantly larger than that of the heatsinks you'd need per typical modern gpu
- olyjohn 3mo agoThe cooling is not an issue for their current designs. Look at their AI1 Satellite specs. They clearly have the cooling figured out. The thing is that it's not a datacenter, it's a single rack. A single rack that weighs multiple tons. You can figure out the weight of the thing based on the total power output, and "power to weight ratio" from SpaceX's own diagrams. Then look up how much it costs to launch per ton, and even look up what they are projecting it will cost with Starship. Even if they get costs down, it's still astronomical. I just can't figure out who would pay that much money to put a rack into space. There's no way the power savings are worth it. Unless you have some niche where you need your workload in space, I can't see the value at all.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- rtkwe 3mo agoIt's not just the weight some outside groups have done the calculations and to dissipate the heat at the operating temperatures in the white paper without a heat pump to increase the radiator temp and thus efficiency requires a massive pump that would have to move nearly 69,000 kg of coolant per second continuously without fail.
- chris_money202 3mo agoRepairability and depreciation are the main problems. A earth data center can be repaired, depreciated, and recycled at EoL recovering some of the costs. SpaceX datacenters are a total write off from the moment they are launched.
- jacobgold 3mo agoThat's actually not a concern I'd have, because hardware that has been sufficiently tested and burned in tends not to fail for a very long time. I've done builds that ran for 5+ years with virtually no physical attention, just continual degradation as hardware is taken out of service. There's also not much money to recover from 5+ year-old hardware. I used to run AI inference GPU servers in road vehicles, which is probably an even harsher environment than a single rocket launch, and the vibration problems are real but solvable.
- nijave 3mo agoGPUs depreciate super fast. It might last 5-7 years but it's already outdated at 2-3 Also space has more radiation
- bakies 3mo agouhh no I dont think the road vehicle is harsher than a rocket launch
- jacobgold 3mo agoThe rocket's payload most likely has higher peak vibration but only for a few minutes, and just one time. The road vehicle's payload is shocked by every pot hole and speed bump, for years.
- asadotzler 3mo ago5 years is a Starlink's typical lifetime. Data center satellite lifetimes will probably be shorter. Demise sooner, replace more often. GPUs get more energy efficient every year and leaving the slower, hungrier chips up there much longer than 3 years seems wasteful given the cheap cost of launch. I think this could be done at an interesting scale even on Falcon 9 alone. If Starship does even 20% of its early design goals, it'll beat Falcon 9 and we could see orbital servers being demised and replaced every 3 years, maybe even 2, for ones with abnormally high failure rates. Now, whether or not this will all make money in the end has a lot to do with what's going on down here on terra firma and how long it takes to get useful capacity into orbit. (It's taken 7 years to get Starlink capacity enough for serving 10M customers. Verizon FiOS did 10M in 5 years. AT&T Fiber took 4-5 years to deploy to 10M. So, space isn't a lot slower than terrestrial.)
- nickff 3mo agoSPCX is valued as an AI company; any and all issues you have with AI company valuations apply to to SPCX. I too agree that SPCX’s space business is real and valuable, but it’s (almost completely) irrelevant here.
- dragontamer 3mo agoBecause SpaceX bought xAI/Twitter. All of the losses are from the xAI/Twitter side of the house. And Elon Musk needs a flimsy story so that no one sues him. It doesnt have to be a believable story, it just needs to be enough so that no lawyer cares to bring a case in Texas vs SpaceX and Elon for breach of fiduciary duty. The story did its job. Elon offloaded the money losing Twitter/xAI out of his personal wealth and onto the public through SpaceX. Done and done. SpaceX is now an AI company (or contains one) and needs to perform as such. ------- It's literally the same story as Tesla/Solar City. Make up bullshit about solar panel synergy with EVs and buy out his cousins failing company. Make it TSLA shareholders problem for figuring out how to make a profit from the failing company, it's no longer Kimball Musks concern since the buyout
- doctoboggan 3mo ago> Is there anyone credible who thinks this is a plausible pathway for SpaceX to make huge amounts of profit? Scott Manly (who I think is credible) has a video where he goes over the logistics of SpaceX's space based data centers. He seems to think its an idea worth pursuing, but its important to note that his expertise is space tech, and not business strategy.
- jacobgold 3mo agoYeah, I have no doubt that it's possible to put GPU servers in space. The Starlink satellites are servers in space. The question is whether it's even remotely profitable to do this for AI training/inference servers.
- bakies 3mo agoThe same way that xAI has compute on the ground and there's such demand that the compute exists so it will be sold. I think SpaceX can conceivably sell the space compute easily. This goes with the business strategy of Elon which is just sell services to himself. He sells rocket launches to himself with the excuse of creating a space datacenter. The same way he sells cybertrucks to spacex because the public won't buy them. I'm pretty confident it's definitely cheaper to put the compute in Texas, but might be viable enough to sell himself rocket launches and make his company worth more to leverage for more ventures. I'm not a business person I don't really get how it's all so valuable if the only demand is itself.
- nijave 3mo agoTraining, no. Latency is too high. Inference the latency becomes trivial. Other things, I suspect latency is too high again.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- pjscott 3mo agoThey're going for an orbital height of 600–800 km, or about 2-3 light-milliseconds from Earth's surface. A lot of people think of satellites as being necessarily high-latency because of intuition drawn from satellites in geosynchronous orbit – but those are about 50x farther away from earth and have correspondingly longer ping times.
- RIMR 3mo agoLet's just put it this way: The ISS produces about 120 kilowatts of electricity. An Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPU uses 1.2 kilowatts of electricity. So, you would need a similar array of solar panels and radiators just to power 100 of them. You probably would need 2-3 launches for a satellite this big, and realistically, you would just make smaller satellites. That's $4,000,000 worth of GPUs, A couple millon or more of RAM, SSDs, etc., a radiation-proof satellite housing to support all of that hardware, solar arrays, launch costs ($74M per Falcon launch), all for maintenance to be impossible and the hardware to become obsolete in a couple of years. It's a delusion unless we invent some way to go to space for free.
- LorenDB 3mo agoSpaceX would be launching these on Starship, which has a much lower targeted launch cost.
- RIMR 3mo agoFor reasons already outlined, I have doubts about their math. Targeting $250/kg payload costs is ambitious for a rocket that has not yet successfully reached orbit or proven cost-effective. Even if we do somehow succeed at affordably dumping tons of GPUs into orbit, what do we do about the Kessler Syndrome?
- fittingopposite 3mo agoFrom first principles, does anyone know what the minimum costs are to put a rocket into space? There must be a minimum cost given that the rocket engines have to thrust until reaching escape velocity to get you to space.
- AnthonyMouse 3mo agoI don't really get the obsolete argument. The thing has two main parts. One, a bunch of solar panels, shielding and radiators. This the heavy / expensive to launch part, but should last for what, decades? Two, a bunch of GPUs/servers. These become obsolete, but so what? They're not that heavy, so every few years you send up another rocket and swap them out.
- leptons 3mo agoThe only way it makes sense is if you think the massive job losses due to AI will lead to people burning down datacenters on earth. An older spec'd and unmaintainable datacenter is worth way more than one in ashes.
- onion2k 3mo agoRichard Campbell did a great talk at NDC a month about about this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo7MEPgWGic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo7MEPgWGic
- htlemur_bobby 3mo ago[dead]
- tmp10423288442 3mo agoThe ocean is worse than space from every perspective but cooling, radiation shielding, and cost/ease of installation. But that just highlights how bad of an idea space-based data centers are at this time.
- metalliqaz 3mo ago> from every perspective but cooling, radiation shielding, and cost/ease of installation. Oh is that all? Those are major data center concerns. Don't forget the biggest one: an ocean-based system could be pulled up and serviced without the need for a human-rated rocket. Oh, and bandwidth/latency. The ONLY benefit of space is that it doesn't require siting a major construction in a town full of angry residents, and it has abundant solar power. But given how much it costs to get the solar panels in orbit, that power sure ain't free.
- eldenring 3mo agoCooling is relatively easy, you just need radiators which are passive, and essentially reduce to a launch cost penalty. You are right that they can't be serviced, but that is missing the point of orbital data centers. The whole point is that you can build hundreds of thousands of these in a factory and launch them in a scalable manner. The power, cooling, etc. comes for "free". In the long run, as the cost of the chip, launches, etc. goes down, orbital data centers will scale better terrestrial ones. As a side note, I don't understand why I keep seeing these wrong arguments on HN repeatedly. Like everything mentioned in this thread can easily be fact checked. Radiative cooling is solved, launch costs are going down, so power costs will pay themselves back very quickly, etc. You can argue about specifics, like chips will get more sophisticated + power efficient and fabrication will be the true longterm bottleneck, or SMRs/fusion could reduce energy bottlenecks, but talking about cooling as if convective cooling is the only option is just nonsensical.
- metalliqaz 3mo ago> Radiative cooling is solved. This is emphatically not true at any scale in which this scheme makes sense. Be careful with including too many Musk boosters in your information diet.
- WalterBright 3mo ago> Data centers submerged in the ocean Sooner or later it's going to leak.
- abfan1127 3mo agoI think corrosion is the big issue here. perhaps that is where the leak comes from.
- WalterBright 3mo agoWater under high pressure will find any weakness. (For example, the places where the wires go in and out.) Corrosion indeed is always a problem.
- tekne 3mo agoNot if the datacenter itself is operating at the same internal pressure as the water around it
- WalterBright 3mo agoInteresting point. But also consider: 1. pressure may compromise the electronics 2. water pressure increases very rapidly with depth. You'd have to pressurize the data center with a liquid with the same density 3. even a small differential will produce leaks
- tekne 3mo agoAir (or rather, nitrogen -- oxygen at that pressure is something you'd rather avoid) can be pressurised to that degree too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_pool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_pool
- deaton 3mo agoTo me it feels like a way for Musk to justify directing AI money towards his first true love, which was space.
- FuckButtons 3mo agoThe only barely sane rationale that I’ve heard for wanting datacenters in space is that they would give space-x low latency signal processing capacity it would need to turn Starlink into a real time Passive SAR constellation.
- xtracto 3mo agoToo bad the things that really matter don't make "sense" (mostly people talk about economic sense when talking about this). Increasing the temperature of the earth , and water usage are two things that using Space data centers will excel vs the alternatives. However society has just not been able to price that directly into these huge buildings. Funny that I agree with EM idea on this, but the reasons are so far away.
- paxys 3mo agoFor something to be a viable product it has to solve a problem. What problems are data centers in space solving? I can't think of a single one.
- techgnosis 3mo agoNo noise pollution or actual pollution from gas turbines. No using water in the desert. No angry communities.
- paxys 3mo agoNone of these are problems if you put data centers far away from population. No one does that right now because it's a lot more expensive to set up and maintain, because you have to set up all the infrastructure from scratch. You know what's 10000x more expensive than that? Setting up the infrastructure in space.
- tootie 3mo agoLike much new technology, it evades regulations. Hyperscalers are getting crushed by popular backlash and resource constraints. And like typically nerds they'd rather dream up a massively overengineered solution rather than face their responsibility as human beings.
- esalman 3mo ago> have only an enthusiast's understanding of rockets and physics, so I'm genuinely open-minded to the possibility. I used to be open minded too but lost all sense of credibility in anything Elon Musk touches when he called nanotechnology a pseudoscience. Since then it's only been downhill. One does not have to be subject matter expert, even China is vertically landing rockets now.
- tim333 3mo agoPaul Graham has been positive about the YC startup doing data centers in space https://x.com/paulg/status/2009686627506065779 https://x.com/paulg/status/2009686627506065779 For the idea to make sense I think you have to project forward some years to launches being cheaper and compute demand outrunning the energy grid.
- johneth 3mo agoWhat makes you think Paul Graham knows what he's talking about re: space, data centers, and the logistics of lifting data centers into space and the ongoing maintenance of them. I don't understand the deification his thoughts receive around here.
- tim333 3mo agoOk, he's not a space expert but seems quite sensible and wrote that after hanging out with the Starcloud guy who already has a GPU in space and an FCC application for launching 88,000 satellites with more. Presumably the Starcloud guy knows something about such logistics.