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Data centers in space makes no sense

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Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#921

Post by maxdo »

foobiekr wrote: post #901
maxdo wrote: post #832

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 franc…

And if France decides to jam you until you play nice?

it's extreemly hard to jam starlink, ask russians at war. also that gpu run results can be connected somewhere in england, and requested using ipv6 e.g. you need to start moderating internet heavily etc.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#922

Post by tshadley »

cryptonector wrote: post #868

Data centers in space make no sense because cooling things in space is insanely hard! Yeah, space is cold, but also you don't have access to large thermal masses with which to exchange heat, so the fact that space is cold does not help much. In space the only option for cooling is large radiators. If you had a data center in space you'd need enormous radiators -- much larger than the data center itself. (On Earth we…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_droplet_radiator

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#924

Post by loourr »

I think the thing I often see missed in these discussions is the cost and time burden imposed by regulation. It's nearly impossible to build power plants in the US today. Launching satellites while hard, solves this problem.

Even if it's more expensive, Spacex will be able to deploy hardware when no one else can because all the gas turbines and existing power plants have been exhausted and the lead time to build new ones is 5+ years out because of the bureaucratic overhead.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#925

Post by padjo »

blauditore wrote: post #599

The Kessler syndrome is mentioned, satellites colliding, causing a cascade of follow-up collisions. This gets brought up a lot, but people have a poor intuition on how large the orbit space is. Think of it this way: It's obviously larger that Earth's surface, and placing, say, a million objects on Earth still leaves a lot of space between them (there are thousands as many humans). Yes, satellites move in certain orbi…

The other way people get confused about Kessler syndrome is that they imagine it's like the movie Gravity where it happens suddenly rather than a slow process that plays out over years/decades.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#926

Post by mchusma »

The bull case IMO is that you can just produce very standardized ai satellites, load them into Starship, blast them off and have them work. And that the cost of that versus permitting etc will be less than trying to do it on land. I kind of believe it could get there. We could build nuclear reactors next to giant facilities but...we can't really seem to do it in the US? China seems to be able to do it.

PS. I think the authors argument that millions of satellites might run into each other is silly. There are like 1.5 B cars.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#927

Post by Rover222 »

The top comment: "Musk is up to something here."

It never fails here. Ya'll are soooo determined to assume ulterior motivations. He has always been direct about his motivations, whether it's about politics or business decisions.

To suspect his whole plan for datacenters in space is a ruse or something to drive up some stock price (or whatever), is... just ridiculous. You really think they person who leads SpaceX (more satellites than the rest of the world combined) and Xai (with a competitive frontier model in 2 years starting from scratch), and Tesla (more inference compute than any company on Earth) really knows less than you about the math and physics of this idea??

His immediate focus for Starship has shifted from Mars colonisation to exponential expansion of intelligence, as he thinks it's the best path to extend consciousness. Ridiculous or not, he believes that, and that's the motivation.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#928

Post by Rover222 »

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…

My lord a sensible comment her. A hearty upvote.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#929

Post by fuzzfactor »

guluarte wrote: post #116
xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #89

You guys clearly didn't read the full blog post where Musk mentions lunar mining. They're going to put an ASML machine on the moon and turns regolith into chips and solar panels automatically. Literally free compute

Also cities in Mars, like who the fuck wants to live there?

>cities

Not my downvote, I know what you mean.

Much rather live way out in the boonies, as far away from civilization as possible.

Oh wait . . .

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#930

Post by stonogo »

pera wrote: post #565
hirsin wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply put no, 50MW is not the typical hyperscaler cloud size. It's not even the typical single datacenter size. A single AI rack consumes 60kW, and there is apparently a single DC that alone consumes 650MW. When Microsoft puts in a DC, the machines are done in units of a "stamp", ie a couple racks together. These aren't scaled by dollar or sqft, but by the MW. And on top of that... That's a bunch of satellites not e…

New GPU dense racks are going up to 300kW, but I believe the normal at moment for hyperscalers is somewhere around ~150kW, can someone confirm? The energy demand of these DCs is monstrous, I seriously can't imagine something similar being deployed in orbit...

Most of the OEMs are past 300kW racks, planning on 600kW racks within a year or two, with realistic plans to hit a megawatt
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