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Data centers in space makes no sense

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Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#341

Post by alansammarone »

vitaflo wrote: post #164
Bender wrote: post #2

AI data-centers use upwards of 100MW. The biggest solar panels in space could produce around 240KW. When they speak of AI data-centers in space what do they actually mean in realistic non theoretical terms and where are the materials for this coming from? If the AI data-center used only 10MW then each could have two redundant SMR's assuming the cooling challenges have been worked out but then we could have nuclear re…

This is the thing I don’t get. Everyone talking about the “how” but nobody talking about the “why”? It makes literally no sense.

Because people have to compete just to have sand doing math for us? The why is that it's high time we stop worrying about how much compute we have. Certainly filling all solid planets in the solar system with computers is not nearly enough computation as we want (I'm not even talking about AI specifically).

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#342

Post by marcosdumay »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #300

> Kessler syndrome: a cascading explosion of debris crippling our access to space I'm taking the parts of this write-up I don't have expertise with a grain of salt after seeig this. Kessler cascades are real. Particularly at high altitudes. They're less of a problem in LEO. And in no case can they "[cripple] our access to space." (At current technology levels. To cripple access to space you need to vaporise material…

> Particularly at high altitudes.

Well, maybe "higher", but not really high.

The lower the altitude, the larger the odds of making one, in a quadratic fashion. But also the lower the altitude, the less time it will last.

There is some space where it lasts basically forever but is small enough for it to happen. It's higher than LEO, and way lower than things like GEO.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#343

Post by nickorlow »

cousinbryce wrote: post #302
nickorlow wrote: post #221

I don't get the point at all of these. You: - have very non-deterministic latency - are located outside of a country that can protect you (ie China could disrupt your space data center) - have to pay millions of dollars to swap out hardware

You’re also located outside of any country that could regulate

A country will definitely still be able to regulate you. Also under what regulations they'd be afraid of other than local building laws

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#345

Post by 93po »

Spooky23 wrote: post #57
Starman_Jones wrote: post #3

Very confused by this plan. Data centers on Earth are struggling with how to get rid of waste heat. It's really, really hard to get rid of waste heat in space. That seems to be about the worst possible place to put a data center.

It’s a distraction as they suck out as much value from Tesla as possible before the music stops and they go bust. There are a few really big IPOs this year including SpaceX, which will likely trigger significant market volatility.

yes, tesla, famously the worst performing car manufacturer with the worst profit margins, is definitely going bust any day now

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#346

Post by adventured »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #227
georgemcbay wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> xAI needs money to win the AI race Off on a tangent here but I'd love for anyone to seriously explain how they believe the "AI race" is economically winnable in any meaningful way. Like what is the believed inflection point that changes us from the current situation (where all of the state-of-the-art models are roughly equal if you squint, and the open models are only like one release cycle behind) to one where som…

They ultimately want to own everyone's business processes, is my guess. You can only jack up the subscription prices on coding models and chatbots by so much, as everyone has already noted... but if OpenAI runs your "smart" CRM and ERP flows, they can really tighten the screws.

If you have the greatest coding agent under your thumb, eventually you orient it toward eating everything else instead of letting everybody else use your agent to build software & make money. Go forward ten years, it's highly likely GPT, Gemini, maybe Claude - they'll have consumed a very large amount of the software ecosystem. Why should MS Office exist at all as a separate piece of software? The various pieces of Office will be trivial for the GPT (etc) of ten years out to fully recreate & maintain internally for OpenAI. There's no scenario where they don't do what the platforms always do: eat the ecosystem, anything they can. If a platform can consume a thing that touches it, it will.

Office? Dead. Box? Dead. DropBox? Dead. And so on. They'll move on anything that touches users (from productivity software to storage). You're not going to pay $20-$30 for GPT and then pay for DropBox too, OpenAI will just do an Amazon Prime maneuver and stack more onto what you get to try to kill everyone else.

Google of course has a huge lead on this move already with their various prominent apps.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#347

Post by 7e »

Data centers in space make sense when you want it to cost 200x more than on land, be unavailable for repairs and upgrades, and be either high latency or be out of commission during periods of darkness.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#348

Post by MBCook »

How much of this is because putting data centers in space is WAY harder for any terrestrial government to get their hands on and seize or block?

They make no sense otherwise.

The only other thing I can think of is the whole thing is just a scheme to get investment and they’re never going to actually go through with it.

At this point I kind of think the former is more likely.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#350

Post by aunty_helen »

marcosdumay wrote: post #325
aunty_helen wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The equation has a ^4 to the temperature. If you raise the temperature of your radiator by ~50 degrees you double its emission capacity. This is well within the range of specialised phase change compressors, aka fancy air conditioning pumps. Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we’ve got a lot of experience in the automotive sector. And finally surface area, once again, getting quite good here with nan…

> aka fancy air conditioning pumps Yeah, pumps, tubes, and fluids are some of the worst things to add to a satellite. It's probably cheaper to use more radiators. Maybe it's possible to make something economical with Peltier elements. But it's still not even a budget problem yet, it's not plainly not viable. > getting quite good here with nanotechnology Small features and fractal surfaces are useless here.

My dude, heat pipes were invented for satellites and there’s people walking around with piezo pumps in their phones these days. We’re getting close.

Peltiers generate a lot of heat to get the job done so even though electricity is pretty much free, probably not a sure bet.

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