51–60 of 116 posts
Oracle cannot possibly be expecting to meet its bets here. My own empirical one-person observation is that my friend worked there in the group that went around the world standing up their new cloud datacenters, and he was there from basically 2019 to earlier this year. They laid him and half his team off earlier this year. Absolutely nonsensical if they're really building out cloud data centers. Because that's exactl…
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Space 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.
You think that building out space infrastructure is a less hard problem to solve than bribing a few local governments to get some building permits?
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?
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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 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+batt…
Space 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.
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On 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 10…
Why restrict yourself to 100% solar? Solar augmented by grid is pretty great. Also, you very conspicuously avoided talking about the difficulty/impact of a 1GW datacenter in space. One might suspect your motives aren't as impartial as you seem to think.
I don't have any motives, what are you talking about? I don't own SpaceX stock if that's what you're thinking.
What's the difficulty of a 1GW datacenter in space? The number of satellites it requires seems to be within the realm of what SpaceX has already achieved. If the calculations are wrong, by all means say so, I haven't checked them.
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Sending 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 se…
https://youtu.be/FKHENV75b9Q?si=JFBsT2HinR02AI4P
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On 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 10…
How 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.
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> Because that's exactly what his job was for the previous 5 years... Or possibly senior leadership isn’t happy with the pace of DC buildout over the last 5-years.
Very unlikely to be the technical build team at fault for that. Real estate, legal, permitting, utility connections, construction, plant fit out, testing and certification, security, customs and immigration, and shipping all need to happen first - and every one of those has room for huge amounts of uncertainty and delay, more so if you're doing it internationally. There aren't many shortcuts that you can take when yo…
Oracle cannot possibly be expecting to meet its bets here. My own empirical one-person observation is that my friend worked there in the group that went around the world standing up their new cloud datacenters, and he was there from basically 2019 to earlier this year. They laid him and half his team off earlier this year. Absolutely nonsensical if they're really building out cloud data centers. Because that's exactl…
Perhaps Larry Ellison is a bad man?
From what I can tell, the DC buildout isn't going that well. I've been wondering about the current status of the projects because there hasn't been much in the news or here about new DC's coming online. This report summary makes the point that getting power to the datacenters with onsite generation is running into roadblocks from permitting to even finding turbines to buy. He who shouldn't be named (here) made the sa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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+batt…
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