121–130 of 1001 posts
I still don't understand the "data center in space" narrative. How are they going to solve the cooling issue?
Maintenance cost must be pretty fucking insane This "Space Datacenter" sounds like biggest bullshit in last decade, which is pretty damn fucking high bar.
I still don't understand the "data center in space" narrative. How are they going to solve the cooling issue?
Cooling a datacenter in space isn't really any harder than cooling a starlink in space, the ratio of solar panels to radiating area will have to be about the same. There is nothing uniquely heat-producing about GPUs, ultimately almost all energy collected by a satellite's solar panels ends up as heat in the satellite. IMO the big problem is the lack of maintainability.
A watt is a watt and cooling isn't any different just because some heat came from a GPU. But a GPU cluster will consume order of magnitudes more electricity, and will require a proportionally larger surface area to radiate heat compared to a starlink satellite.
Best estimate I can find is that a single starlink satellite uses ~5KW of power and has a radiator of a few square meters.
Power usage for 1000 B200's would be in the ballpark of 1000kW. That's around 1000 square meters of radiators.
Then the heat needs to be dispersed evenly across the radiators, which means a lot of heat pipes.
Cooling GPU's in space will be anything but easy and almost certainly won't be cost competitive with ground-based data centers.
5 days after Tesla gave xAi 2 billion.
> The basic math is that launching a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, with no ongoing operational or maintenance needs. Ultimately, there is a path to launching 1 TW/year from Earth. > My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space. This is so obviously false. Fo…
It's always 2-3 years with this guy
SpaceX is too big to fail. It's important for national security. I wonder if Elon wants to tangle all his businesses into SpaceX so they are all kept afloat by SpaceX's importance.
Merging SpaceX with a public company like Tesla would create a lot of issues for the classified projects SpaceX does.
Plenty of defense contractors with classified projects are already publicly listed, so this is not uncharted territory.
Lockhead Martin for example: https://investors.lockheedmartin.com/news-releases/news-rele...
Gives this level of detail:
> Aeronautics classified program losses $(950)
> MFC classified program losses -
It seems very safe from a national security perspective.
Either this is a straight up con, or Musk found a glitch in physics. It's extremely difficult to keep things cold in space.
Existing satellites manage to keep their equipment that already can consume several kW cool just fine. You might need space for radiators, but there is plenty space in space.
Radiators in space are extremely inefficient because there's no conduction.
Also you have huge heat inputs from the sun. So you need substantial cooling before you get around to actually cooling the GPUs.
SpaceX is too big to fail. It's important for national security. I wonder if Elon wants to tangle all his businesses into SpaceX so they are all kept afloat by SpaceX's importance.
Twitter/X in xAI
SolarCity into Tesla
xAI into SpaceC
I am just waiting now for Tesla to be acquired by SpaceC as it has run into issues.
Why?