Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Data centers in space makes no sense

civai.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

941–950 of 1001 posts

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#941

Post by jodrellblank »

NegativeK wrote: post #319
rybosworld wrote: post #248

It seems like every argument in favor of doing this is: "yeah sure but what if X was Y% cheaper?" And some of us are reading these things and trying to be polite. But at some point patience runs thin and the only response that breaks through the irrationality is some variation of "what if unicorns and centaurs had teamed up with Sauron?" The limit of the ratio of useful:useless "what if's" approaches zero.

With regards to a community, I once heard someone say that it takes 10 "atta boy"'s to counteract 1 "you suck". I also remember, roughly 10 years ago, people saying that the amount of effort to discredit bullshit is wildly out of whack. Which makes bullshit basically asymmetric warfare. So here we are, in this thread, actually spending time attempting to discredit bullshit.

"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." - Brandolini's Law - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#942

Post by jodrellblank »

perfmode wrote: post #387

Current analysis shows space-based compute costs roughly 3x more per watt than terrestrial equivalents, requiring launch costs to fall below $200/kg before achieving economic parity—a threshold unlikely before the mid-2030s even with Starship’s full reusability. While technically not impossible, the space data center vision appears primarily designed to support SpaceX’s anticipated mid-2026 IPO and justify a $1.5 tri…

How can there ever ever be economic parity between (doing x) and (doing x + launching x into space) ?

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#943

Post by virtualhat »

The author seems to have confused a few things.

* They assume 1 satalite = 1 GPU. This is quite funny, actually. A single H200 floating in space with a solar panel and an antenna. In reality, a satellite would pack as many chips as the heat/power allows. A Starlink-sized satellite should be able to hold 40 or so chips. There's no reason why a larger satellitte couldn't hold, say, 1024. * They mention training, but sampling is what makes sense here. Training is a different beast, and requires high reliability, high bandwidth, low latency, and a lot of IO. Space would not be ideal for this. I'd expect training to remain terrestrial and just do sampling in space. (FWIW, sampling will be most of the compute allocation). * Also, no one upgrades GPUs in datacenters, they just add new nodes and leave the old ones there. Google still has their P100 nodes running. Not being able to fix them, though, is a significant concern.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#944

Post by ajyoon »

virtualhat wrote: post #943

The author seems to have confused a few things. * They assume 1 satalite = 1 GPU. This is quite funny, actually. A single H200 floating in space with a solar panel and an antenna. In reality, a satellite would pack as many chips as the heat/power allows. A Starlink-sized satellite should be able to hold 40 or so chips. There's no reason why a larger satellitte couldn't hold, say, 1024. * They mention training, but sa…

Fair - my "millions" note is wrt SpaceX filing with the FCC to launch 1 million satellites, and the Google viability study deals with large constellations rather than monolithic stations. Public communications from companies purporting to go into orbital data centers have made every appearance that they think virtually all compute can go to space.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#945

Post by pointlessone »

diabllicseagull wrote: post #739
pointlessone wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DGX H200 is 10,2 kW. So that like 10 of them. Or only 80 H200. Doesn’t sound like a big data center. More like a server room. ISS radiators are huge 13.6x3.1 m. Each radiates 35 kW. So you need 3 of them to have your 100 kW target. They are also filled with gas that needs pumping so not exactly a passive system and as such can break down for a whole lot of reasons. You also need to collect that power so you need abou…

if I may add, you can't really launch a station three times the size of ISS with a single rocket so there will be multiple launches. Just the launch costs alone could likely finance multiple similarly sized server rooms on land.

It should be smaller than ISS. IIRC, ISS has three solar arrays and two radiators. DGX is about the size of a fridge. Let’s add two more fridges worth of infra for solar and radiator. Maybe another fridge for comms. But these three fridges replace all the modules of ISS. It’s still gonna be about 6 (maybe up to 10?) tons of mass to lift. But Starship can do 100-150 tons to LEO so might be doable.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#946

Post by vel0city »

strangeloops85 wrote: post #201
bs7280 wrote: post #163

As a thought experiment, if humanity wanted to go all in on trying to move industrial processes and data centers off planet, would it make more sense to do so on the moon? The moon has: - Some water - Some materials that can be used to manufacture crude things (like heat sinks?) - a ton of area to brute force the heat sink problem - a surface to burry the data centers under to solve the radiation problem - close enou…

The elephant in the room for all lunar scenarios is lunar regolith. Even ignoring the toxicity to humans (big problem and will happen quite quickly for any humans there!), it will be a big long-term problem for robots and machinery in general.

A lot of people don't quite understand how terrible of a material lunar regolith dust is. There's not much stuff on Earth quite like it. The Moon doesn't experience any weathering, so its all super sharp and jagged compared to how smooth even the grittiest sand is here on Earth. Its electrostatically charged so it wants to cling to dang near everything. Its highly toxic to breathe in for the same reason as miner's lung. It will work its way into every joint and seal.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#947

Post by vel0city »

loourr wrote: post #924

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…

> It's nearly impossible to build power plants in the US today

If you're just building solar panels and using batteries you don't need grid approval to build it and connect it to your own datacenter. The same is true if you're wanting to just use natural gas to a large extent, although you'll have more regulations regarding environmental emissions. But you'll get that when you're trying to get a million space launches approved as well.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#948

Post by jujube3 »

phire wrote: post #244

As far as I can tell, Data centres in space only seem viable because their advocates insist on comparing them to standard terrestrial data centres. And nobody ever calls them out on it. Today's data centres are optimised for reliability, redundancy, density, repairability, connectivity and latency. Most of advertised savings come not from placing the data centre in space, but the fact that advocates have argued away…

The strategies used to cool something in space are not going to work at all in the desert. The amount of solar power you'll get in the desert is orders of magnitude less, and intermittent. In the desert you will have to deal with rain, weather, and other parts of nature.

Elon has already built tons of data centers here on earth. He knows how to build them quickly. People even build them in tents these days.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#949

Post by jodrellblank »

Zanni wrote: post #367

Electric cars make no sense. Reusable rockets make no sense. Autonomous cars make no sense. Data centers in space make no sense. Humanoid robots make no sense.

- Electric motors were invented in 1827 and one of the first things the inventor did was a toy electric car in 1827. The first proper electric car was 1890, and they were popular as golf carts and milk floats through the 1900s. What they were lacking was good enough batteries. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle#History

- Reusable rockets have been a thing since the Space Shuttle in 1981, building on a 1969 plan for reusable space vehicles. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle

- Autonomous cars: human chauffeurs and taxis (and trains) so we can be moved around without doing the driving, go back to the first cars. We haven't had the technology to build them (and arguably don't and won't have until we get near AGI).

- Data centers in space ... ???? Bueller? Bueller?

- Humanoid robots were seen in Fritz Lang's Metropolis film in 1927, they've always made sense. What doesn't make sense is lying about having built humanoid robots and then having to admit they were being remote controlled, cough Tesla.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(1927_film)

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#950

Post by [deleted] »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #617
Starman_Jones wrote: post #3

Very confused by this plan. Data centers on Earth are struggling with how to get rid of waste heat. It's really, really hard to get rid of waste heat in space. That seems to be about the worst possible place to put a data center.

You are confusing engineering challenges with show stoppers. Cooling in space is a well studied problem with a few possible solutions. They all boil down to needing a lot of mass to radiate heat out to the universe and ways to conduct heat. We've been doing that at small scale for decades. SpaceX is already operating a fleet of many thousands of satellites that they built and engineered. They'd be well familiar with…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN