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The idea that we can’t get enough electrical power on earth because of supply constraints, but that we can solve that by launching the datacenters and their ent
by skywhopper 3mo ago
The idea that we can’t get enough electrical power on earth because of supply constraints, but that we can solve that by launching the datacenters and their entire support infrastructure into space makes no sense unless you’re a huckster trying to pump up your space launch business ahead of an IPO. There’s no way we are more constrained on land-based solar+battery equipment than we would be on space-worthy solar+battery+space-cooling equipment plus sufficient launch infrastructure and resources. Meanwhile, our government is paying companies to stop building wind power and bombing sources of natural gas.
- ai-x 3mo ago[flagged]
- _keats 3mo agoI think the question here is: do the laws of economics allow it?
- ai-x 3mo agoYes. https://youtu.be/FKHENV75b9Q?si=JFBsT2HinR02AI4P https://youtu.be/FKHENV75b9Q?si=JFBsT2HinR02AI4P
- sumeno 3mo agoOh, well, if the CEO of a company who only exists to try to convince people it is possible says it's possible on a podcast hosted by a VC firm who also wants to convince people it is possible so they can make their money back then it must be! I've always wondered who is gullible enough to even bother watching this kind of garbage, thank you for answering that question.
- dh2022 3mo agoHow much SpaceX stock did you buy? Are you buying this dip?
- DauntingPear7 3mo agoHow do the laws of physics allow it? How do you disperse the heat? How do you protect your compute from cosmic rays? How do you get enough solar up there without catastrophic damage from micrometeorites?
- NitpickLawyer 3mo agoI think the company that has managed to launch and currently operates ~10k satellites can figure those out. Still remains to be seen if the economics make sense, but with increased "anti" stuff happening all around (some of which surely is manufactured) who knows? 5 - 10 years from now things might change.
- smallerize 3mo agoArs Technica is doing a series on this. They have published 2/3 parts so far. https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-build-orbital-data-centers-actually/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-buil...
- henry2023 3mo agoSending to LEO costs around $2,700 usd and 9kWh of fuel per kilogram. If you manage to send a data center with high end processing units, large array of solar panels, even larger liquid cooling and tick shielding against solar rays you’d have spent probably 100x to 1000x the cost of an equivalent earth data center even without considering hardware deprecation. You’re better off sinking your data center deep in the sea and even that is probably not happening at large scales.
- idontwantthis 3mo agoI tried to find what the worst option is other than putting them in space and you can do a lot! Trucking diesel to the middle of the Sahara is a decent option in comparison to space.
- fhdkweig 3mo agoDon't forget trucking in the cooling water.
- ai-x 3mo agohttps://youtu.be/FKHENV75b9Q?si=JFBsT2HinR02AI4P https://youtu.be/FKHENV75b9Q?si=JFBsT2HinR02AI4P
- ZoneZealot 3mo agoI mean if we're replying with videos at this point, here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qpdUNMt2yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qpdUNMt2yg
- ai-x 3mo agoOne is actually building while the other is making Youtube videos. Also the video literally answers the economic question. I'm happy with my bet
- 3mo ago
- bryanlarsen 3mo agoSpace data centers require hundreds of daily launches. Disney and the massive industries around Canaveral will NIMBY it hard.
- Scaled 3mo agoSpace data centers are an intrinsically cool idea, and honestly I hope we see at least one for the sheer marvel of such a project. But to be cost efficient, it has to be cheaper than rural US, cheaper than buying some island, cheaper than setting it up on a converted freighter ship and tanking the fuel in, etc. BUT once Earth has a fully paid off space elevator the unit economics will make sense, or if we have orbital space factories and don't have any lift costs, etc. It's all possible, but at a 50 year+ timescale and immense investment. All of which I hope for because I'd like to see more space development and exploration.
- chasd00 3mo agosheesh i didn't say a datacenter-in-space was a good/feasibnle idea. The point i was making is I feel that building power plants to power a datacenter is turning out to be harder than software people realize and multi-year (or worse) delays likely the result.
- wmf 3mo agoFor whatever reason, nobody is trying to build solar-powered AI datacenters. Maybe they can't find enough land.
- quickthrowman 3mo agoIt takes 2.5 million solar panels to generate 1GW of electricity assuming 400W per panel and direct sunlight. 2.5M times 18 sq ft per panel is about 1000 acres or ~1.55 sq mi. That would work for a 1 GW data center, during the day, without clouds, during the summer.
- downrightmike 3mo agoThe US gov't owns at least 50% of every state in the west. Or they could just build in the middle of bum f*ck Texas and get fossil and renewables. Too bad Texas' grid is so piss poor
- AnthonyMouse 3mo agoThe Texas grid that already generates more TWh from renewables than any other state?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3mo agoIs that supposed to be a lot? The US is some 3.8 million square miles. A decade old Reddit thread estimated there are 60 square miles of just McDonalds. That is, a McDonalds footprint of solar panels alone is 39GW. https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/2bq7l2/so_if_mcdonalds_with_all_their_real_estate_pooled/ https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/2bq7l2/so_i...
- fckgw 3mo agoThe space required to install enough solar panels, especially in the places these things are going (like Ohio, where it's NOT ideal for solar generation), would far, far outsize the data center itself by a significant magnitude.
- 3mo ago
- ww520 3mo agoSpace DC make sense when local governments and communities don't want DC built on Earth. Space DC is an engineering and finance problem, not a problem in legal/permission, real estate, power generation, grid delivery, environmental, etc.
- gtowey 3mo agoYou think that building out space infrastructure is a less hard problem to solve than bribing a few local governments to get some building permits?
- panny 3mo ago>a less hard problem to solve than bribing a few local governments Wouldn't it be best if the data centers were just... good neighbors? Like everyone talking about illegal bribes and impossible moonshots when the answer is just don't suck?
- lightbritefight 3mo agoThe issue with this is that datacenters are inherent "suck" machines. It takes a lot more effort and cost for them to not suck then for them to suck, so "sucking" is part of their core design. Up till recently, they were a rare enough object that distressed communities still saw the glitz and glam that they are sold with as valuable. Now that brutalist assholes are trying to jam them in every nook and cranny of the earth, word is getting out and people aren't buying it anymore. There have been some attempts to try floating or water immersed data centers that mitigate or at least hide some of their suckiness, but these were hard and costly, so the incentives weren't there to do them anyway. Maybe now those ideas will resurface and improve, but I expect "bribe, con or sue rural community to destroy their quality of life" is still cheaper and easier.
- fhdkweig 3mo agoWe are well past the point of these companies caring about their reputations. People are already losing their homes over this. Here is Penguinz0's commentary on a news report of GA Power eminent domaining someone's home to run a power line through it to power a data center. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bySJ-oVGtvs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bySJ-oVGtvs
- mike_hearn 3mo agoOn Earth it has to be fossil fuels. With solar you can't do it. I haven't done the calculations myself so, full disclosure, AI work ahead. But I asked GPT 5.6 how big a solar and battery farm would have to be to power a one gigawatt datacenter such that it could ride out a few cloudy days in a row (this is far below the reliability bar). Its answer is you'd need an "absurdly large battery" and a solar farm of over 100 square kilometers, quite possibly up to over 200 square kilometers. And it would need to be built in the desert. Also, normal utility scale LiON battery sites are only meant to provide stabilization services for hours, not days. The problem is you have to overspec the solar farm quite a lot because it must not only be able to power a one gigawatt facility, but also generate more than that so it can recharge the battery packs during the day too. So this just doesn't work. You think datacenter permitting is bad when it only requires some on-site gas turbines? Imagine the difficulty of getting a 200 square kilometer solar farm over the finishing line. No, it's quite possible Elon is going to win this one. Regulation is expensive! He can just fire a constant stream of satellites into space. The constellation needed to provide a gigawatt of inferencing would be about the same size as today's Starlink system, well within the bounds of what he's proven can be done. The threat to space based datacenters isn't really the physics of it. It's the risk of a bubble pop that temporarily craters demand and/or an overbuild of terrestrial capacity. Outside of the software industry we don't see huge new blocks of inferencing demand, and OpenAI at least doesn't seem capacity constrained at all right now.
- abirch 3mo agoHow do you cool the data center in space cost effectively? Unfortunately in space there isn't a lot of material (air) to transfer the heat.
- mike_hearn 3mo agoYou can just use ordinary radiators. Do the calculations, cooling isn't the problem it's made out to be.
- abirch 3mo agoIt's the size of the radiators and the expense of getting them up into orbit (along with maintenance) Most of my assumptions come from discussions like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876105