151–160 of 230 posts
And with $160MM in funding at a $1.1B valuation? I don't know about their debt, but to get to LEO in 8 years on that little money is extremely impressive.
A small but bright light in an economy where manufacturing jobs are hard to come by ( https://archive.ph/Haj8n ).
It's so sad that the Modi clique controls India. If India could become a real democracy, it could be competitive in the long run against China, because assuming similar quality and costs, people in democracies would much rather support a democracy than sinomarxist China or crazy-oligarch orange king country. But with Modi in charge, none of that is possible. Old men really need to leave politics, they just cause too…
I haven't followed Indian politics in a while, but I don't understand the "real democracy" comment. Can you elaborate on this? Or is it because Modi won three elections in a row?
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If I understand correctly, NY is concerned about the power and water consumption. 1. How do they get power in space? (solar) Do the same on earth at 1/100 the cost (or build 50x the number of solar to account for atmospheric loss and you will still come out ahead) 2. How do they get water in space (they don't). Whatever they do in space to not need water, do the same on earth! 3. People don't like living near datacen…
The point is that while power and water is scarce in space, the NY state has no jurisdiction there. It might literally be easier to build data center in space than it is to overcome social and political pressure in NY.
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Mein Gott, you're not just making this up ( https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/neevcloud-and-agn... ). But.. why? Musk bandwagon-hopping? Investor bamboozlery? (Same diff?) Is my borderline childish understanding of basic physics THAT off because I cannot see the value or utility (beyond a small smear of niche edge cases) of space-based compute? - ed, disclosure: You seem to have edited your response whilst I…
> Is my borderline childish understanding of basic physics THAT off because I cannot see the value or utility (beyond a small smear of niche edge cases) of space-based compute? Don't worry, most of the people online didn't get the memo on this. One of the major selling points of orbital compute is power supply - more specifically, it turns out that, compared to beaming power from space, it's projected to be cheaper t…
This is damning with the faintest of praise. Beaming power from space is a terrible idea.
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The point is that while power and water is scarce in space, the NY state has no jurisdiction there. It might literally be easier to build data center in space than it is to overcome social and political pressure in NY.
It's extremely unlikely that companies will find no locations that let them build zero power zero water data centers. And bulk AI stuff isn't latency sensitive either so the acceptable build radius is huge.
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Also, Pixxel, Skyroot, and Agnikul are targeting orbital data center launches this year for defense applications (which is what the entire ODC story is about). The US NRO already uses India's Pixxel [0] along with Finland's ICEYE (which is now co-manufacturing synthetic aperture sats in India with Agnikul [1]) for hyperspectral scanning. Edit: can't reply > But.. why? Missile Defense and C4ISR [2]. Seconds matter, so…
This borders on science fiction. 88,000-and 1-million satellite clusters (as claimed in your link) are hard to take seriously, especially with the possibility of Kessler Syndrome. Also: 1. How do you cool your chips? Vacuum is a thermal insulator, so radiators are required to remove heat. nVidia (or even ASICs) require much and specialised cooling. 2. How does one radiation harden a H100? 3. I'm also seeing where TCO…
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The projections are questionable, but this is something the US and China are experimenting with as well. 1 and 2 are still open questions, but these are not aimed to be commercial grade DCs - this is basically edge compute (think a handful of racks). 3 is not a problem for defense usecases. (EDIT: Discussion here seems to point out that data OP is using might be flawed [1]). Ignoring the fact that just about every or…
3 is not a problem for defense usecases. Cost is the critical constraint for defense programs. Yes, militaries spend a shit-ton of money, but that's usually in a penny wise and pound foolish way. A dollar spent on your project is a dollar that's not spent on the innumerable things generals think are critical to their future wars like boondoggles, missiles, planes, ships, missile defense systems, etc. The exception is…
It's so sad that the Modi clique controls India. If India could become a real democracy, it could be competitive in the long run against China, because assuming similar quality and costs, people in democracies would much rather support a democracy than sinomarxist China or crazy-oligarch orange king country. But with Modi in charge, none of that is possible. Old men really need to leave politics, they just cause too…
Modi is bad, but Congress are objectively worst than him. This mean India have no choice.
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> Is my borderline childish understanding of basic physics THAT off because I cannot see the value or utility (beyond a small smear of niche edge cases) of space-based compute? In the real world, "physics" is not necessarily the gating factor. There is a major concern about the environmental footprint of terrestrial data centers, to the point where major U.S. states are enacting moratoriums: https://www.governor.ny.g…
If the "physics" tells you that your satellite cannot radiate heat away from your nVidia GPU cluster because each H100 needs 1.1 meter square of radiator, then opinions do not matter. The same applies to power supply and bandwidth.
There may be an economic challenge - which seems to be the sort of problem mass manufacturing can solve very well.
There may be a compute model & latency problem, how do you organize model training when racks are much further apart than in traditional data centres (although speed of light is 50% faster in vacuum than glass fibre). But that's algorithms.
Relative to everything else in orbit, powering a rack of compute and some comms per satellite seems not really to be a physics problem.