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Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
191–200 of 201 posts
Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paul Graham has been positive about the YC startup doing data centers in space 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.
What 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.
Ok, 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.
Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
>but in an affordable and sustainable manner Affordable is a bit questionable. It's heavily subsidized by Starlink and government. Not completely clear what happens to price if SpaceX doesn't keep launch demand propped up with their own business.
SpaceX bids on competitive government space launch contracts and wins most of them because they're more reliable and often half the price of the competitors, or less. Government is now essentially subsidizing SpaceX's space launch competitors, giving them more expensive contracts on which they often fail to deliver, only because the government doesn't want to be dependent on a single space launch contractor. So compl…
Starlink is so cheap because economies of scale ie volume of launches. They only have a large volume of launches because Starlink (123 ish of 165 ish launches in 2025)
Without Starlink, they would need to charge government launches much higher.
Starlink has really fast asset depreciation at ~5 years as well as competition from ever expanding terrestrial wireless (5G NR)
Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 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.
Datacenters in Antarctica or deep ocean also fulfill that.
No, not really.
Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The numbers are brutal. Starcloud’s own white paper estimates that a two-sided radiator held around 20°C would emit only about 633 watts per square meter, over 1,000 times slower than water cooling of AI chips on Earth. So, a puny 1-megawatt orbital data centre, 1,000 times smaller than the gigawatt scale of hyperscale data centres on Earth, would need about 1,600 square meters of radiator, an area roughly the size…
chips run way hotter than 20C, and radiative cooling scales to the fourth power of temperature. check the math
Don't you think a company like Starcloud has a reason to put 20C in their white paper?
Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
#196Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
#197Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thermal dissipation scales quartically with T, that's about as graceful as you can get from a physics POV, very few things scale at that rate. COTs GPUs throttle at about 90-100C but that's because they have plastic parts and solder that melts. Those are relatively easy to eliminate. We haven't tried much to scale up operating temp.
Apple tried the damnedest at that during their intel era. Silicon gets exponentially leakier at higher temperatures, and that will outpace quadratic growth easily. (Electronics that works at 200C do exist, but they're not gonna meet a modern smartphone's specs, let alone a datacenter)
>Apple tried the damnedest at that during their intel era.
The story I heard was intel failed to deliver on die shrinks that were supposed to increase thermal efficiency. The fan also had poor routing and basically did nothing.
Apple was clearly not at the top of their game for that design, nor would you expect them to be as the decision was likely already made to move to apple silicon.
Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
#199Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
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