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Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

andrewmccalip.com

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Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#71

Post by Ataraxic »

Scott Manley had a video about this last year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-YcVLq98Ew

The short of it is that cooling is likely the biggest problem, given you will need to pump the heat to the backside and radiate it away, and the amount of mass you will need to dedicate to cooling works against deployments and increases the cost per unit significantly. Not to mention, the idea of these huge deployments runs into potential space debris issues.

Whenever one of these ventures actually manages to launch a proof of concept, I think we'll be able to quickly discern if there is actually a near-future here.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#72

Post by ikiris »

d_silin wrote: post #7
ikiris wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demand for what? A sealab like head in the sand view of lack of data regulation requirements?

specific software applications you can run in space that you can't run on Earth or can't run cheaper on Earth.

Don't be coy, please indicate the math that works differently in silicon in a zero g environment if its not some regulation dodge.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#73

Post by wmf »

xnx wrote: post #50

François Chollet https://x.com/fchollet/status/1999982683708150014 : "Datacenters in space" make for a catchy narrative and an interesting demo, but the math simply doesn't work. When considering factors like launch cost, maintenance complexity, and the cost of high-bandwidth communications (latency included), there is no realistic set of economic and engineering assumptions under which orbiting datacenters become co…

So the guy who shows his work says 3.4x and the guy who doesn't says 50-100x.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#74

Post by notahacker »

brotchie wrote: post #57

Did a similar back-of-the-napkin and got 5x $ / MW of orbital vs. terrestrial. This article's analysis is ~3.4x. I do wonder, at what factor of orbital to terrestrial cost factor it becomes worthwhile. The greater the terrestrial lead time, red tape, permitting, regulations on Earth, the higher the orbital-to-terrestrial factor that's acceptable. A lights-out automated production line pumping out GPU satellites into…

It becomes worthwhile if its actually cheaper (probably significantly cheaper given R&D and risk), or if you're processing data which originates in space and the data transfer or latency is an issue

You can set up plant manufacturing chips in shipping containers and sending them to wherever energy/land is cheapest and regulation most suitable, without having to seek the FCCs approval to get launch approved and your data back...

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#75

Post by JumpCrisscross »

notahacker wrote: post #64
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Putting data centers under water makes way way more sense than into space You need permits underwater. You don’t in space.

The FCC regulates satellites launched from or communicating with the US, including stuff which extends beyond spectrum licensing like mandatory 5 year deorbiting capability for newly launched LEO satellites. Europe, China and India are not regulation-free utopias either. You've actually got more option to jurisdiction-shop with underwater data, but I'm not convinced that's the major issue with building datacentres an…

> FCC regulates satellites launched from or communicating with the US

FCC is easier to deal with than multiple layers of environmental, planning, power, and water concerns at the local, state and federal levels.

> they're not obviously favourable compared with cold place on earth with clear skies and access to cold water

There are fewer of those places that can be developed than there is space. The bottleneck to space is launch. The bottleneck on the ground is power.

I don’t think anyone thinks the math works right now. But as OP showed, it’s surprisingly proximate in a way SBSP is not.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#76

Post by terminalshort »

jofer wrote: post #39

What really worries me is that I keep hearing "cooling is cheap and easy in space!" in a lot of these conversations, and it couldn't be farther from the truth. Cooling is _really_ hard and can't use efficient (i.e. advection-based air or water cooling) approaches and are limited to dramatically less efficient radiative cooling. It doesn't matter that space is cold because cooling is damned hard in a vacuum. The artic…

But space isn't actually cold, or at least not space near Earth. It's about 10 C. And that's only about a 10 C less than room temperature, so a human habitable structure in near earth space won't radiate very much heat. But heat radiated is O(Tobject^4 - Tbackground^4), and a computer can operate up to around 90C (I think) so that is actually a very big difference here. Back of the envelope, a data center at 90C will radiate about 10x the heat that a space station at 20C will. With the massive caveat that I don't know what the constant is here, it could actually be easy to keep a datacenter cool even though it is hard to keep a space station cool.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#77

Post by GMoromisato »

piskov wrote: post #37
GMoromisato wrote: post #16

> ...we should be actively goading more billionaires into spending on irrational, high-variance projects that might actually advance civilization. I feel genuine secondhand embarrassment watching people torch their fortunes on yachts and status cosplay. No one cares about your Loro Piana. I 100% agree with this. There are ~2,600 billionaires in the world and we should encourage all of them to spend their money. Even…

I am still waiting for someone to fund some open-source github projects instead of some new library or museum in their name.

Yes, absolutely! I think this will happen as more billionaires come from the tech world.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#78

Post by danpalmer »

johnsmith1840 wrote: post #69
wmf wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rad-hard silicon ... or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure Somehow I don't think those are the only options. AFAIK Starlink is using a lot of non-rad-hard silicon already.

My understanding is non rad hardened method get around this by basically doubling or some multiple of repeating calculations and chexking data often. Random errors will occur you just need to be checking fast enough to fix and update that bad bit flip. I am sure there's all sorts of fun algorithms in this space but I am under the impression there is SOME tax to doing this. What is the tax? Is it 10% ir 60% I have no…

There's more than that, it's possible to get permanent hardware damage from radiation at smaller (modern standard) process sizes.

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#79

Post by daemonologist »

> This is all to say that the current discourse is increasingly bothering me due to the lack of rigor; people are using back-of-the-envelope math, doing a terrible job of it, and only confirming whatever conclusion they already want. Calculating radiation and the cost of goods is not difficult. Run the numbers.

> References: Gemini, Gemini, ChatGPT, ChatGPT, Gemini, ChatGPT, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini (There are sub-references from these services in the GitHub.)

I think, if you're going to make statements like this - especially from a position of expertise, you should be personally verifying the numbers and citing their sources directly. What good is asking the reader to trust an AI on your behalf? They should trust you.

(To be clear, I suspect the conclusions drawn are still correct.)

Re: Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers

#80

Post by danpalmer »

wmf wrote: post #38
zozbot234 wrote: post #19

Will these space-based data centers run on rad-hard silicon (which is dog slow compared to anything on Earth) or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure due to the harsh space environment? Will they cool that hardware with special über-expensive high-temperature Peltiers that heat the radiators up to visible incandescence so that the heat can be shed with any efficiency? There's zil…

rad-hard silicon ... or just silently accept wrong results, hardware lockups and permanent failure Somehow I don't think those are the only options. AFAIK Starlink is using a lot of non-rad-hard silicon already.

Starlink is however operating at ~500km where radiation is less of a concern, but where the lifetime of a satellite is only 2-3 years.

The unit economics of orbital GPUs suggest that we'll need to run them for much longer than that. This is actually one of the few good points of orbital data centers, normally older hardware is cycled out because it's not economic to run anymore due to power efficiency improvements, but if your power is "free" and you've already got sufficient solar power onboard for the compute, you can just keep running old compute as long as you can keep the satellite up there.

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