Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

Post by aspenmayer » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 9:50 AM UTC

remarkEon wrote: post #260

eldenring wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google did a study with their TPU v6 > For ML accelerators to be effective in space, they must withstand the environment of low-Earth orbit. We tested Trillium, Google’s v6e Cloud TPU, in a 67MeV proton beam to test for impact from total ionizing dose (TID) and single event effects (SEEs). > > The results were promising. While the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) subsystems were the most sensitive component, they only beg…

Do you have a link to this?

I'm not the person you asked, but it appears to be a direct quote from this page, previously on HN:

Exploring a space-based, scalable AI infrastructure system design - https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalabl... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45813267 (Nov 4 2025, 44 points, 73 comments)

> Project Suncatcher is a moonshot exploring a new frontier: equipping solar-powered satellite constellations with TPUs and free-space optical links to one day scale machine learning compute in space.

Post by JoeAltmaier » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 2:24 PM UTC

lurquer wrote: post #269

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lift costs dropping geometrically. Cost and weight of solar decreasing similarly. The trend makes space-based centers nearly inevitable. Reminds me of "Those darn cars! Everybody knows that trains and horses are the way to travel."

> Reminds me of "Those darn cars! Everybody knows that trains and horses are the way to travel."… … said nobody ever.

You must be very young. This was well-known back in the day. Lots of articles (some even posted here some time back) of rant on cars, how they were ruining everything.

Btw The cute one-line slam doesn't really belong here. It's an empty comment, adds zero to the conversation, contributes nothing to the reader. It only makes a twelve year old feel a brief burst of endorphins. Please refrain.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers