Can't wait for competitors destroying the other guys installation because just like international waters, there is no police or border there.
Data centers in space makes no sense
741–750 of 1001 posts
Re: Data centers in space makes no sense
#742Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> Sales of Tesla's electric Cybertruck fell 48% in 2025, new data shows.
> Tesla sold 20,237 Cybertrucks in 2025, down from 38,965 the previous year, according to figures from Kelley Blue Book's annual electric vehicle (EV) sales reports.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-cybertruck-sales-elon-mus...
> A federal safety report shows that Tesla is recalling 63,619 of its futuristic pickups, and this seems to be the total number of Cybertrucks built since the first one was delivered at the end of 2023.
https://www.arenaev.com/teslas_latest_recall_reveals_real_cy...
> Musk said that it's time to put the Model S and Model X vehicles to rest. Now it's not that huge of a change, given that 97% of Tesla's sales consist of Model 3 and Model Y cars, but the Model S is still the original car delivered by Tesla.
https://www.arenaev.com/tesla_discontinues_the_model_s_and_m...
> The financial report paints a grim picture for the company. Tesla's total profit for 2025 was €3.24 billion. That is a lot of money, whichever way you look at it, but it is actually 46 percent less than what the company made in 2024. The profit margin, which is the percentage of money the company keeps after paying expenses, fell to just 4.9 percent. In 2022, that number sat at 23.8 percent.
> One of the most interesting parts of the financial report is how Tesla made its money. A large chunk of its profit did not come from selling EVs to people. Instead, it came from selling "regulatory credits" to other car companies that need help meeting pollution rules. These credits brought in €2 billion.
> That means 52 percent of Tesla's entire profit for the year came from these credits, not from selling vehicles. If Tesla did not have those credits, the financial results would look much worse. And the problem the company is facing? Those credits are gone; they won't be part of Tesla's business model this year since they were cancelled by the current administration.
https://www.arenaev.com/tesla_profits_drop_as_automaker_star...
Tesla is betting on long shots like humanoid robots and self driving taxis everywhere. There are other desperation moves like merging Tesla (profitable) with SpaceX (I think it's also profitable? but most of its business is governments: risky markets) and xAI (most likely wildly unprofitable, just like Twitter).
Re: Data centers in space makes no sense
#743Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm confused about the level of conversation here. Can we actually run the math on heat dissipation and feasibility? A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate. There are around 10K starlink satellites already in orbit, which means that the Starlink constellation is already effectively equivalent to a 50 Mega-watt (in a rou…
Output from radiating heat scales with area it can dissipate from. Lots of small satellites have a much higher ratio than fewer larger satellites. Cooling 10k separate objects is orders of magnitude easier than 10 objects at 1000x the power use, even if the total power output is the same. Distributing useful work over so many small objects is a very hard problem, and not even shown to be possible at useful scales for…
Whatever sat datacenter they biuld, it would run better/easier/faster/cheaper sitting on the ground in antarctica than it would in space, or floating on the ocean, without the launch costs. Space is useful for those activities that can only be done from space. For general computing? Not until all the empty parts of the globe are full.
This is a pump-and-dump bid for investor money. They will line up to give it to him.
Re: Data centers in space makes no sense
#744As the focus here is solely on the US, and the comments focus too much on the impossibility of heat dissipation, I want to include some information to broaden the perspective. - In the EU, the ASCEND study conducted in 2024 by Thales Alenia Space found that data center in space could be possible by 2035. Data center in space could contribute to the EU's Net-Zero goal by 2050 [1] - heat dissipation could be greatly en…
> Data center in space could contribute to the EU's Net-Zero goal by 2050
How unbelievably crass. "Let's build something out of immense quantities of environmentally-destructive-to-extract materials and shoot it into space on top of gargantuan amounts of heat and greenhouse gas emissions; since it won't use much earth-sourced energy once it's up there, that nets out to a win!"
Insane.
Re: Data centers in space makes no sense
#745I'm glad I read HN.
My take-away is - SpaceX is still an extremely good stock to hold. However, the stupid money will buy the stock at IPO on the promise of space datacentres.
When SpaceX inevitably u-turns on this plan and the stock plummets temporarily, THAT will be a good time to buy in.
Re: Data centers in space makes no sense
#746Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is And yet journalists at major institutions have been repeating Musk's claims with very little skepticism ("xAI and SpaceX are merging to bring data centers to space").
For people new to HN (Paul Graham - PG - is HN's founder): https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html > Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't…
There is no accountability anymore. Literal crypto pump and dump schemes mint millionaires and funnel money to billionaires and not a single investigation, indictment, court case, sentence, or even fine!
It's a casino and the mirage of billionaire competency would vanish instantly if the media were even slightly skeptical.
The media is owned, it's a sham. It's a play.
> And techies fall for his stories every time, hook, line and sinker, because he's speaking about core geek fantasies.
Not all techies, but enough of them to keep the raft afloat.
Re: Data centers in space makes no sense
#747Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is And yet journalists at major institutions have been repeating Musk's claims with very little skepticism ("xAI and SpaceX are merging to bring data centers to space").
I believe you're better served by editorials for opinion, journalism should be comparatively rigorous. "Musk says" is not "plans/hopes"
I can't tell what you're actually saying. Is "Musk says Moon is made of blue cheese" as a title, without pointing out the fact that the moon is not made of blue cheese a kind of "rigorous" reporting?
Dealing in hallways gossip is not the job we granted the press extra constitutional protections for.
Re: Data centers in space makes no sense
#748It sounds cool and gets investors.
Re: Data centers in space makes no sense
#749Data centers in space may or may not make sense (personally I'm quite skeptical) but the objections in the article certainly don't make sense. 1. The only reason there are 15,000 satellites in space is because SpaceX launched about 9,500 of them (Starlink is 65% of all satellites) on their semi-reusable Falcon 9. If fully-reusable Starship pans out, they will be launching satellites at 10x the rate of Falcon 9 at the…
2) it is extremely common to add storage to existing servers. Only slightly less; RAM, CPUs etc. not to mention how often it is cost-effective to replace broken components.
Re: Data centers in space makes no sense
#750One major point I haven’t seen mentioned is maintenance.
Nvidia GPUs, particularly H100s, have a failure rate orders of magnitudes higher than traditional CPU-only hardware. I myself have accidentally melted an H100 during a large-scale training run.
While it’s trivial to replace a broken GPU in the ground, it seems to be infeasible in space during the life of the satellite. Getting a human or robot “fixer” spacecraft to it would likely cost more than the $30K GPU itself.