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Data centers in space makes no sense

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Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#831

Post by Terr_ »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #651
ehnto wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're about as close as we have ever been to a holo-deck with VR/AR right now, but it is notable that it is still a fringe technology. I think basically no one cares about space data centres except the rule of cool enthusiasts in the technosphere.

The harsh reality of economics and demand is hitting them. For years, Musk's ideas were funded by an overvalued Tesla stock and stupendous amounts of investor money, and currently it's being double down on with the amount of money being poured into AI and its necessary hardware. But the demand / economic viability just isn't there. VR is cool but it's not mainstream. "Metaverse" exists and some companies are making g…

I have to say, this quip has been putting in a lot of work over the last decade for me: "Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#832

Post by maxdo »

AlexandrB wrote: post #825
maxdo wrote: post #815

I have my personal reasons to hate Elon. But the article is full of fluff and lacks imagination, typical of the "the world is static and will never change" mindset. What they are trying to do is an a very ambitious engineering challenge in several highly integrated domains, from spaceships to robotics, gpu, server design , ai. Typical stakes are high margins are high. Project also pushes boundaries of what human can…

> Jurisdiction. Servers can't be shut down or taken away by police, etc. Total pipe dream. They can't take away your servers, but they can imprison you until you provide access. And SpaceX would still fall under the laws of whichever country it's based in. If lawful access is really a problem, laws will be written to make it SpaceX's problem. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/

yes... and no. Right now you need a server lets say in france. You are fully in their jurisdiction, for latency etc.

What if your server fly over france , but not in France, hence: you don't need to build servers in france, unlike before, you don't need to deal with local government on so many issues, water, electricity etc to be local in france.

And , taxes : crypto payments + compute , and same transaction in france doesn't have to be taxed anymore :)

Yes, you have to pay taxes to US government, but not to france.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#833

Post by hermitShell »

After looking for a top level comment pointing to why instead of how, I logged in just for this as I could not find one. Extremely bullish on this move, let me try to explain.

As most engineers realize right away, it is not going to be profitable to operate a regular datacenter in space, per the article (and I agree), so something else is going on here. Almost all the discussion is about feasibility, which is not by itself going to explain the situation.

It is clearly somewhat feasible to build Starlink level infrastructure and operate it profitably. I would posit that the narrative is a funding vehicle for a more conservative, incremental objective.

The very fact that the infrastructure is in space places the datacenter on the legal and geopolitical high ground. It's hard to raid servers if they are in orbit. It's hard to disable, audit, or arm-wrestle into submission. It doesn't have to have the scale we've come to expect in 2026 to be useful. And it's for inference, not training, of course. Useful levels of inference is computationally cheap. There are implications with the financial system as well.

In combination with PLTR technology, what I see is another intelligent and strategic move by Musk to enable and be part of hegemony. He is a central player not making decisions in isolation. They are playing a game with different rules, and therefore different unit economics.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#834

Post by drtz »

mike_hearn wrote: post #582
elamje wrote: post #353

I was talking to someone about this the other day. I was part of a team at NASA that developed a cooling system for the ISS and this whole premise makes no sense to me. 1. Getting things to space is incredibly expensive 2. Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space? 3. Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire t…

It sounds hard but it shouldn't not make sense. 1. Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record. 2. Ingress/egress aren't at all bottlenecks for inferencing. The bytes you get before you max out a context window are trivial, especially after compression. If you're thinking about latency, chat latencies are already quite high and there's going to be…

> It sounds hard but it shouldn't not make sense.

It does not make sense.

The question isn't "can you mitigate the problems to some extent?", it's "can you see a path to making satellite data centers more appealing than terrestrial?"

The answer is a flat out "no," and none of your statements contradict this.

Terrestrial will always be better:

1. Reducing the cost of launches is great, but it will never be as cheap as zero launches.

2. Radio transmissions have equally high bandwidth from Earth, but fiber is a better network backbone in almost every way.

3. Radiation events don't only cause unpredictable data errors, they can also cause circuit latch-ups and cascade into system failure. Error-free operation is still better in any case. Earth's magenetosphere and atmosphere give you radiation shielding for free, rad-hard chips will always cost more than standard (do they even exist for this application?), and extra shielding will always cost more than no shielding.

4. On Earth you can use conduction, convection, AND radiation for cooling. Space only gets you marginally more effective radiation.

5. Solar is cheaper on the ground than in space. The increase in solar collection capability per unit area in space doesn't offset the cost of launch: you can get 20kW of terrestrial solar collection for around the price of a single 1U satellite launch, and that solar production can be used on upgraded equipment in the future. Any solar you put on a satellite gets decommissioned when the inference hardware is obsolete.

And this ignores other issues like hardware upgrades, troubleshooting, repairs, and recycling that are essentially impossible in space, but are trivial on the ground.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#835

Post by bigbuppo »

beloch wrote: post #115

I would not assume cooling has been worked out. Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build…

He's got a trillion dollar compensation package on the line. You can absolutely guarantee he's doing something shady.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#836

Post by skeptic_ai »

beloch wrote: post #115

I would not assume cooling has been worked out. Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build…

The 4-5nm gpu will break from high energy protons from the sun.

Lag for roundtrip: 35ms. But when satelite needs to pass through other satellites as has no ground coverage you add more lag and reduce bandwidth of the whole network.

The best part is jurisdiction safety. Very hard to get raided by govs.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#837

Post by drtz »

FranklinJabar wrote: post #609
mike_hearn wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds hard but it shouldn't not make sense. 1. Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record. 2. Ingress/egress aren't at all bottlenecks for inferencing. The bytes you get before you max out a context window are trivial, especially after compression. If you're thinking about latency, chat latencies are already quite high and there's going to be…

> There is probably plenty of scope to optimize space radiators. It was never a priority until now and is "just" an engineering problem. Well, it's a physics problem. The engineering solution is possibly not cost efficient. I'd put a lot of money that it isn't.

Not only is it not cost-effective, it's pointless (in this context).

Radiators works almost just as well on Earth. Convection and conduction more than make up the difference.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#838

Post by rishabhjain1198 »

> Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers.

This statement is actually completely false. The bottleneck is not cost of building data centers, but the energy accessible on the planet. How much we're willing to pay for increasing that is currently very unclear, but it's far more than the current cost of building a terrestrial data center.

As Jensen Huang famously touted their performance per watt, saying "Our customers won't buy our competitor's chips even if they were free."

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#839

Post by AlexandrB »

SilverBirch wrote: post #621

I'm sorry I really don't understand this. I have a computer. I put it in a warehouse. You have a computer, you shoot it into space. What problem have you solved? Is this all an effort to utilize more efficient solar panels? Are solar panels really the limiting factor for data centres?

I think some people like this because it pushes libertarian "no need for environmental or regulatory review" buttons. There's a kernel of a valid argument there, but it seems overstated given that companies seem to have little trouble getting approval for big datacenter buildouts here on earth.

There's also the coolness factor, I guess.

But why does no one talk about launching RackSpace servers into space? I think the whole thing is tied to AI because of the hype, not because sending servers into space has any kind of material advantages.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#840

Post by bigbuppo »

ineedasername wrote: post #829
kimixa wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would they bother to build space data center in such monolithic massive structures at all? Direct cables between semi-independent units the size of a star link v2 satellite. That satellite size is large enough to encompass a typical 42U server rack even without much physical reconfiguration. It doesn't need to be "warehouse sized building, but in space", and neither does it have to be countless objects kilometers…

Not just a 42U rack, but a 42U rack that needs one hundred thousand watts of power, and it also needs to be able to remove one hundred thousand watts of heat out of the rack, and then it needs to dump that one hundred thousand watts of heat into space.
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