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Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

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Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

#21

Post by CuriouslyC »

rbanffy wrote: post #17
CuriouslyC wrote: post #7

Honestly, data centers in the ocean make so much more sense than data centers in space it's kind of silly, but Mr Moneybags owns a rocket company he's trying to pump and dump, not a submarine company, so here we are.

I would suggest data centres near the arctic - it's close to most of the Northern hemisphere's users, presents an easy option for cooling (the place is a heat sink), and, with collapsing glaciers, there will be abundant hydro power to be used. It has the killer feature of allowing a human to walk up to a rack and replace a component.

One huge advantage of ocean data centers is that you can do geothermal down there more cheaply and easily, and it's a very consistent source of power, so you don't even need hydro. Additionally, deep ocean water is consistently very near freezing, you could get below freezing out of the water but then you lose conduction efficiency.

The replacability is nice, but even in terrestrial data centers there are situations where something fails and it never gets replaced, just routed around, until the pod gets ripped out and replaced in its entirety.

Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

#22

Post by stackghost »

rbanffy wrote: post #17
CuriouslyC wrote: post #7

Honestly, data centers in the ocean make so much more sense than data centers in space it's kind of silly, but Mr Moneybags owns a rocket company he's trying to pump and dump, not a submarine company, so here we are.

I would suggest data centres near the arctic - it's close to most of the Northern hemisphere's users, presents an easy option for cooling (the place is a heat sink), and, with collapsing glaciers, there will be abundant hydro power to be used. It has the killer feature of allowing a human to walk up to a rack and replace a component.

>I would suggest data centres near the arctic - it's close to most of the Northern hemisphere's users, presents an easy option for cooling (the place is a heat sink), and, with collapsing glaciers, there will be abundant hydro power to be used.

Advocating for exacerbating the melting of the polar ice cap, which will endanger dozens of millions of people, just to have more convenient data centers for manufacturing AI slop, is peak HN.

Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

#24

Post by arjie »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #7

Honestly, data centers in the ocean make so much more sense than data centers in space it's kind of silly, but Mr Moneybags owns a rocket company he's trying to pump and dump, not a submarine company, so here we are.

What’s the regulatory path to something like this? Oceans seem to have all the problems of land except manifold: permitting is nigh impossible, and power is hard to line up.

To make it worse, underwater tech is notoriously hard to make operationally visible. Sabotage is trivial and undifferentiable from failure and honest error. When we used to work in trading subsea cable cuts in Asia would constantly ruin our best networks. Everyone had point to point microwave expressly because it wasn’t breakable in this way. Exposing compute to this rather than just networking would have doomed the entire enterprise.

Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

#25

Post by Zigurd »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #7

Honestly, data centers in the ocean make so much more sense than data centers in space it's kind of silly, but Mr Moneybags owns a rocket company he's trying to pump and dump, not a submarine company, so here we are.

He must have that cave submarine lying around somewhere.

Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

#26

Post by CuriouslyC »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #20
CuriouslyC wrote: post #7

Honestly, data centers in the ocean make so much more sense than data centers in space it's kind of silly, but Mr Moneybags owns a rocket company he's trying to pump and dump, not a submarine company, so here we are.

Corrosion is one hell of a problem in salt water. I think the specific attraction to space is the copious massive amounts of free solar energy, isn't it? (In reality, they want to build the torment nexus at the Lagrange points because that would just be edgy-as-fuck)

That is a problem, but you already have to contend with GPU refresh every ~6 years, it's likely you'd pre-build pods that you could sink and link, then you'd float them and refurbish at refresh time. With that cycle time it's a manageable engineering challenge.

Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

#27

Post by Zigurd »

Remember space manufacturing? When the first modules of ISS were launched 27 years ago, that was supposed to be the next big thing. Space manufacturing, asteroid mining, and space data centers are pipedreams. The capital equipment is too heavy, and 100% forever automated operations are not realistic.

Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

#28

Post by biomcgary »

tristanj wrote: post #5

Economics calculator for Orbital vs Terrestrial Data Centers https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters You can play around with the cost sliders to estimate the economics, but even being quite optimistic, space data centers cost ~2-3x of their terrestrial counterparts.

But, datacenter development in space does not deal with local NIMBYs, just centralized decision-makers that are easier to "influence".

Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

#29

Post by OutOfHere »

tristanj wrote: post #5

Economics calculator for Orbital vs Terrestrial Data Centers https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters You can play around with the cost sliders to estimate the economics, but even being quite optimistic, space data centers cost ~2-3x of their terrestrial counterparts.

You are altogether externalizing the cost of carbon dioxide emissions that humanity has to pay for. The resulting global warming is not a joke. The heat problem cumulatively is bigger on Earth than it would be in space.

Re: Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

#30

Post by jubilanti »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #20
CuriouslyC wrote: post #7

Honestly, data centers in the ocean make so much more sense than data centers in space it's kind of silly, but Mr Moneybags owns a rocket company he's trying to pump and dump, not a submarine company, so here we are.

Corrosion is one hell of a problem in salt water. I think the specific attraction to space is the copious massive amounts of free solar energy, isn't it? (In reality, they want to build the torment nexus at the Lagrange points because that would just be edgy-as-fuck)

> I think the specific attraction to space is the copious massive amounts of free solar energy, isn't it?

Yes you get more energy harvest from solar above the atmosphere and can orient them to always be pointed towards the sun. But it is still so much more expensive than building out conventional solar in the Sun Belt, which is so much more expensive than just building a massive natural gas plant right next to people's homes.

No, space is desirable because there is no local permitting authority that can push back. People living near data centers have gotten wise to the fact that local people pay most of the externalities of data centers and AI, but the benefits mostly go elsewhere, and the jobs created during construction are temporary. In space, you don't have to lobby/bribe local politicians and astroturf a YIMBY movement.

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