Data centers in space makes no sense

I would assume that the current GPU systems are not optimized for weight. I would also assume that they need to build special purpose GPU equipment for space, which could possibly be made much lighter than the current ones.

This sentence proves the author has no ability for logical thinking: Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers.

I too don't think it's currently a sensible solution. But the author completely unable to make a proper case. For instance, just to refute that one claim, there are many reasons to do it in space even at an cost.

Space-based data centers provide an off-world backup that is immune to Earth-specific disasters like earthquakes, floods, fires, or grid collapses. Servers in orbit are physically isolated from terrestrial threats, making them safe from riots, local warfare, or physical break-ins.

Moving infrastructure to space solves local community disputes by removing the strain on residential power grids and freeing up land for housing or nature. Space data centers do not deplete Earth’s freshwater supply for cooling, unlike terrestrial centers which consume billions of gallons annually.

Solar panels in orbit can access high-intensity sunlight 24 hours a day without interference from clouds, night, or the atmosphere.

Data stored in space can exist outside of national borders, protecting it from seizure, censorship, or the legal jurisdiction of unstable governments. Data transmission can be faster in space because light travels roughly 30% faster in a vacuum than it does through fiber optic cables.

Processing data directly in orbit is necessary for satellites and future space stations to avoid the delay and cost of beaming raw data back to Earth

> It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.

What (literally) on earth makes you say this? The arctic has excellent cooling and extremely poor sun exposure. Where would the energy come from?

A satellite in sun-synchronous orbit would have approximately 3-5X more energy generation than a terrestrial solar panel in the arctic. Additionally anything terrestrial needs maintenance for e.g. clearing dust and snow off of the panels (a major concern in deserts which would otherwise seem to be ideal locations).

There are so many more considerations that go into terrestrial generation. This is not to deny the criticism of orbital panels, but rather to encourage a real and apolitical engineering discussion.

But the focus on building giant monolithic datacenters comes from the practicalities of ground based construction. There are huge overheads involved with obtaining permits, grid connections, leveling land, pouring concrete foundations, building roads and increasingly often now, building a power plant on site. So it makes sense to amortize these overheads by building massive facilities, which is why they get so big.

That doesn't mean you need a gigawatt of power before achieving anything useful. For training, maybe, but not for inference which scales horizontally.

With satellites you need an orbital slot and launch time, and I honestly don't know how hard it is to get those, but space is pretty big and the only reasons for denying them would be safety. Once those are obtained done you can make satellite inferencing cubes in a factory and just keep launching them on a cadence.

I also strongly suspect, given some background reading, that radiator tech is very far from optimized. Most stuff we put into space so far just doesn't have big cooling needs, so there wasn't a market for advanced space radiator tech. If now there is, there's probably a lot of low hanging fruit (droplet radiators maybe).

Its not just cooling thats totally not worked out, its internal networking, its power management (what happens when its in darkness?) how do you certify servers for +/-10g vibration (https://www.ralspace.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/Dynamics-and-vibration...)

What about gamma rays? there is a reason why "space hardened" microcontrollers are MIPS chips from the 90s on massive dies with a huge wedge of metal on it. You can't just take a normal 4micron die and yeet it into space and have done with it.

Then there is the downlink. If you want low latency, then you need to be in Low earth orbit. That means that you'll spend >40% of your time in darkness. So not only do you need to have a MAssive heat exchanger and liquid cooling loop, which is space rated, you need to have ?20mwhr of battery as well (also cooled/heated because swinging +/- 140 C every 90 minutes is not going to make them happy)

Then there is data consistency, is this inference only? or are we expecting to have a mesh network that can do whole "datacentre" cache coherence? because I have bad news for you if you're going to try that.

Its just complete and total bollocks.

utter utter bollocks.