You can play around with the cost sliders to estimate the economics, but even being quite optimistic, space data centers cost ~2-3x of their terrestrial counterparts.
To remove heat by radiation there's a big benefit to running the GPUs hotter as the radiation will be proportional to the fourth power of temperature. This resource is using 85 deg C versus 60 deg C for OP which will improve cooling performance.
If Nvidia/SpaceX can make the chips run at a higher temperature that would help a lot although I assume it would have already been done if it were possible. Another option is to add a heat pump to raise radiator temperature if the smaller radiator mass can pay for the heat pump mass.
If radiator temperature is critical you can just run a heat pump to boost it. Modern heat pumps can get pretty close to the Carnot limit for the temperature interval, for example a pump cooling to 300K and dumping out heat at 400K (125°C) will have a theoretical COP limit of 4 and a practical limit of 2.5-3.
That means that for every 3 units of heat your chips emit, you will use a 4th unit to spin the pump. If your panels generate 150kW, you will only have 113kW available for compute and the rest is cooling. Radiators will more than halve vs 340K operation, so it's net beneficial.
It's all a giant techno-economic optimization problem: the extra mass of solar panels you need vs saved radiators vs mass of the pump, the die temperatures you achieve and corresponding performance, durability and chip price point etc.
The answer seems to be large, lightweight sunshades to protect the radiative coolers. That would avoid the degradation due to UV radiation mentioned in the article and would also increase the efficiency of the coolers.
Could they run the chips at "normal" temperatures and then heat pump that all into some other mass that lives at "aerospace alloy" temperatures and radiates it away more efficiently?
Sorry but wouldn’t space based DCs need radiation hardened parts which are typically a few generations behind SoTA? Do the centers deploy massive shields to protect the electronics?
I haven't heard of that being a problem for Starlink, whatever they've done there seems to be working. The Orbital AI would be at a higher orbit but still within LEO which reduces the radiation. I wonder if occasional bit flips even matter for typical AI calculations. Quantization seems to suggest a lot of the lower bits aren't all that important. Either way SpaceX has already had success building systems with commercial-off-the-shelf products in space.
To me the biggest problem of the system is the dependence on launch cost. The more launch cost can be lowered the more viable the system is and the more options there are for solving every problem. But IMO the reason Musk is building this system is to lower launch cost. He needs a project that can fund a high volume of launches and create economies of scale to lower launch cost, the way that Starlink did for Falcon 9.
> I haven't heard of that being a problem for Starlink, whatever they've done there seems to be working.
Starlink doesn't need GPUs, they use hardened chips. The first question is, can whatever works as a 2nm GPU work where Starlink is?
The second question is even funnier: Starlink satellites have a limited lifespan and regularly burn up in the atmosphere when they fall back to Earth - that's due to the need to fly them at low altitudes where, coincidentally, the radiation is lower.
Where then will the flying data centers be - high with higher radiation or low with a higher fall rate? And I doubt those heavy birds are going to burn up fully before hitting somebody's head.
That particular concern is currently covered as far as SpaceX is concerned since it launches under DoD coverage. See the California Coastal Commission and the fact that they had to apologize etc. for attempted overreach.
The point of datacenters in space is about control not economics. They dont want the masses which they are trying to replace with AI and robots to have access to the datacenters running everything.
You might be on to something. Starship is moving its launch facility to Florida. Elon previously suspected a sniper shooting at the SpaceX rockets. Moving the launches to Cape Canaveral would make them much harder for a sniper to target. And his terrestrial data centers are easily accessible for anyone who has a grudge with him. Moving those to space would also isolate him from the masses uprising.
You are altogether externalizing the cost of carbon dioxide emissions that humanity has to pay for. The resulting global warming is not a joke. The heat problem cumulatively is bigger on Earth than it would be in space.
How do we bootstrap to the point where we eventually have factories in space?
If it were up to me, I would be researching and optimizing non-chemical propulsion, also green synthetic fuels for launches. Unfortunately, we will have to leave that for some firm other than SpaceX to develop.
They'll pay the price if it means their data centers are immune to the anger of the commoners who are being surveilled, analyzed, and manipulated by systems running on these data centers.
Let's be honest. The only reason orbital data centers are a talking point at all is to justify the stratospheric SpaceX valuation for the IPO. There's literally no other reason.
Everybody who knows anything about data centers understands this. You don't even need to get into the thermodynamics of cooling where the only option is radiating away heat. Terrestial data centers have to use water cooling because the heat generation is so significant.
The real problem is failure. When you have a lot of servers, things fail all the time. Hard drives, SSDs, RAM chips, GPUs, motherboard, etc. Servers are designed to be able to quickly replace parts. If your data center is in orbit, these parts will just fail and there is no repair. There's certainly no economic repair.
If I remember my numbers rightly, at a company like Amazon or Google, the ratio is (IIRC) 1 FTE per 10,000 servers, meaning if you have 10,000 servers, 1 FTE will spend their entire time just replacing parts. A good hardware tech will have a pool of known good parts. When a server detects a fault, they'll go and replace probably everything with known good parts and then figure out what's wrong later. In GPU heavy DCs I suspect 1 FTE can cover fewer than that just because the heat management is much more complicated.
I really can't believe we're still talking about this. It borders on journalistic malpractice to even suggest this is a realistic possibility.
I mean, I think it's cool and a "good idea" in terms of getting off this rock and out into the black.
We can do it, we just have to decide we want to. If we're going to have a Tulip Mania Redux I'd rather have it with space data centers and reusable rockets and autonomous human-level AI moonshots/boondoggles than... I don't know, literal tulips, or factoring large numbers to mine bitcoin or whatever...
Only a single order of magnitude of cost? So a $4b data center on Earth delivers the same value as a $40b data center in Space? So if you have greater than a 95% operating margin and capacity constraints (either due to nation environmental law, power limits, or other such blockers) then this is a no-brainer - a 95% operating margin becomes a 50% operating margin. The return on capital is much much lower so you have to be anticipating cheaper capital, even cheaper costs than this in practice, or something else.
Inference margins are some 70% right now? So it needs quite some work on both sides but this seems to make it seem more achievable than I previously thought.
It assumes $44/kg to launch into orbit. Idk where that came from if it's a musk claim or what but it's ludicrous against current costs. Currently still at thousands/kg and dropping but nowhere near $44 and I haven't heard anyone claim that's likely who isn't selling a rocket company.
The plan is to launch from Earth in the beginning stages and then switch to launching from the Moon which has no atmosphere so you don't need rockets and can use an electromagnetic gun instead.
That requires satellite manufacturing on the Moon and I guess the minerals required will come from asteroid mining.
That's my understanding of what Elon said about how it's going to work.
Elon said they will manufacture big heavy parts on the Moon to reduce the mass they need to use rockets for and maybe ship GPUs from Earth. It sounds like a science-fiction to me but what do I know. You can watch the full interview here:
Musk is deliberately creating a business that needs high volume low cost launch services because in order to get low cost launch high volume is needed, and in order to get high volume a customer is needed. In the same way that Starlink launches were used to create the Falcon 9 economies of scale, the orbital AI will be used to create the Starship economies of scale. He also wants to bet the whole company on this which creates pressure to deliver and not just coast on what they've already accomplished. There are a bunch of related high risk bets but they ultimately connect back to bringing Mars within reach with frequent low cost launch capability.
> the orbital AI will be used to create the Starship economies of scale.
The difference is that Starlink solves a problem people actually have. Space AI solves very few real problems (immunity from regulation, physical security)
>So a $4b data center on Earth delivers the same value as a $40b data center in Space?
It may do so, initially, compared to a new-build DC.
But, critically, you can upgrade the racks in an already-built DC without demolishing the entire building. You can't do that in orbit, so the full lifecycle ROI is lower.
Orbital DCs are constrained by cooling and by bandwidth. Even a space-to-ground laser (which does not currently exist in a sufficiently-mature form) has a fraction of the bandwidth of a proper terrestrial fiber line. So you're paying at least 10x for essentially a disposable datacenter that can't move as much data in or out, and likely will not be as powerful as a terrestrial DC because of the cooling constraint, just to have it in space because reasons.
I don't see the business case, at all.
This is so transparently another hyperloop-esque pipe dream invented for the sole purpose of inflating SpaceX's valuation.
Remember space manufacturing? When the first modules of ISS were launched 27 years ago, that was supposed to be the next big thing. Space manufacturing, asteroid mining, and space data centers are pipedreams. The capital equipment is too heavy, and 100% forever automated operations are not realistic.
Space manufacturing has always been fun one. It is like people have no understanding just how complex the supply chains for well anything we make these days are. Just look at COVID and hit on JIT.
Mining is also hard and harsh. One of the more hostile environments to operate for machinery. Lot of mechanical wear. And having that in space makes any maintenance extremely harder...
Maybe once we can do all that fully autonomously and by that I mean with near zero non-remote intervention we might start thinking about space...
It's still full of delicious rocks with completely insane market value. They sit there waiting for our greed and capabilities to reach escape velocity. Some day there will be a TEMU space station drop shipping custom fidget spinners to wherever we desire them. Probably not any time soon but eventually...
There's also the issue of scaling. Say you can make the engineering work for building a data center in space.
Nobody wants to build just one, or even just a handful. Musk has talked about 10000 launches a year for deploying and maintaining data centers.
At that scale pollution becomes a serious issue. It hasn't been a problem so far because we haven't launched a lot of rockets. Cumulatively the world has under about 8000 orbital launches and under 40000 launches that were not orbital but reached the stratosphere.
Orbital rocket emissions have an impact far beyond what you might expect just from looking at the mass of what they emit, because they emit much of it the upper atmosphere. Many things that when emitted near the surface are only a local problem become a global problem if you emit them in the upper atmosphere.
Tyranny of the rocket equation[0] makes it hard for me to conceive how an orbital data centre could ever make sense.
If you just want to escape permitting laws, why not float it in international waters? That's a much more accessible and hospitable environment than LEO.
Space gets you 24/7 solar power. To run a data center for 12 hours without sunlight, you'd need massive batteries. Also oceans have weather and corrosion.
The issue with putting stuff in space isn't the kinetic energy required. In LEO that's about 30 megajoules per kilogram or $5 worth of propellant. The issue is that orbital launch vehicles are not reusable, so you must destroy an expensive rocket to get your payload to orbit. All of these space datacenter efforts are betting that Starship will be fully reusable.
You can't just sea-stead your way to it though, salt water + network accessibility + literal piracy + how much data you can move + the environmental toll of doing much of anything on the see = equally crazy challenges with more laws that can stop you.
By the time you got permission to lay all the cables you'd need to lay, etc. your competition would already be done with their space data center, or Lunar one in a peak of eternal sunshine or whatever. This is a race to the most compute. Whoever gets the most geniuses in their "country of geniuses in a datacenter" wins.
Wins what? Well, everything they want effectively forever.
When I was peripherally working on some HPC stuff, there was a comment by one of the hardware guys that it mattered which national lab you were building the supercomputer for, because the guys at high altitude like Los Alamos get a lot more bitflips than someone closer to sea-level like Argonne. Although that said, for an exascale supercomputer, the mean time between uncorrected bit flip somewhere in the machine is on the order of a few hours, which means that large supercomputer-scale workloads should actually expect to hit a bit flip in their computation.
Cosmic rays can probably be resolved with some parity bits and redundancy. Especially since these don't have to be located way up in geosynch, lower orbits get you more magnetosphere protection.
Not that it isn't a problem, but I think heat dissipation will have the edge.
I worked at the architecture level on designs to mitigate signal corruption inside the asic. I don't remember the exact numbers, and obviously it depends on the design. but you need to add error detection and correction on every path (busses, mixes, registers, function units, etc). the number I seem to recall was a 25% area overhead and a nominal decrease in clock rate. this was for an earth-bound very large machine, so idk if that would be sufficient for space. usually those designs have much larger nodes and much slower clock rates. primarily because of damage caused by ionizing radiation that accumulates over time.
so sure, the heat issue seems fatal, but rad-hard designs will certainly have a bottom line impact
I'm excited I think of the Cowboy Bebop episode (Jamming With Edward) where they hunt down a rogue satellite to get data off it.
Also think it would be crazy to have a worm spread across the servers/starlink, would there be an antivirus system onboard or maybe not applicable, says RTOS can get a virus
Science fiction beat the author of this article to the punch re: novel cooling solutions in space. The author proposes squirting oil from one arm, through open vacuum, to another arm - the oil droplets radiate the heat en route from arm 1 to arm 2. However, like most modern tech, science fiction writing has anticipated it. In the book Saturns Run (2015), by John Stanford and Ctien, their spaceship cools down it's megawatt nuclear reactor by using a eutectic metal as coolant, which runs as a molten ribbon through open vacuum from arm 1 to arm 2.
How would you power them in the ocean? One of the attractions of space is the free power (the other apparently being less regulations, which may also not apply to the ocean).
I don't know if Musk, or anyone else, has talked about the economics of not being able to (economically) fix things in space. Presumably the idea would be to avoid components that fail more rapidly like mechanical hard drives (use SSDs instead), and to have redundancy so that even if one component fails it doesn't mean the whole satellite/node is now useless.
He must have done the math that at the anticipated failure rate each satellite would pay for itself before failing and needing to be replaced.
Honestly, data centers in the ocean make so much more sense than data centers in space it's kind of silly, but Mr Moneybags owns a rocket company he's trying to pump and dump, not a submarine company, so here we are.
It's like the idea of Mars as a backup to human civilization. The technology required to make Mars livable and independent from Earth is so advanced it would allow you to survive basically anything here on Earth already.
I would suggest data centres near the arctic - it's close to most of the Northern hemisphere's users, presents an easy option for cooling (the place is a heat sink), and, with collapsing glaciers, there will be abundant hydro power to be used.
It has the killer feature of allowing a human to walk up to a rack and replace a component.
A problem with the arctic, is that infrastructure becomes a problem the longer north you go. Even in western countries like Norway, the power grid is simply too small to handle any data center in the northern-most counties. Not to mention the political issue, where those living there would face higher utility bills.
It is assumed that if you want to build lots of data centers up north, you also need to invest in infrastructure. I've seen discussion about smaller modular nuclear power plants, but those things take years. Another thing could be other renewable energy sources.
One huge advantage of ocean data centers is that you can do geothermal down there more cheaply and easily, and it's a very consistent source of power, so you don't even need hydro. Additionally, deep ocean water is consistently very near freezing, you could get below freezing out of the water but then you lose conduction efficiency.
The replacability is nice, but even in terrestrial data centers there are situations where something fails and it never gets replaced, just routed around, until the pod gets ripped out and replaced in its entirety.
NIMBY stuff is an issue too, I live in AK and would love if we started building them, but there are infrastructure problems and then people who have never worked in the arctic frantically pitching a fit about caribou they’ve never seen.
NIMBY stuff is why we will go to space. In space nobody can tell you “no.”
>I would suggest data centres near the arctic - it's close to most of the Northern hemisphere's users, presents an easy option for cooling (the place is a heat sink), and, with collapsing glaciers, there will be abundant hydro power to be used.
Advocating for exacerbating the melting of the polar ice cap, which will endanger dozens of millions of people, just to have more convenient data centers for manufacturing AI slop, is peak HN.
stackghost, if they use less cooling power, how is that exacerbating melting ice caps? And how is making use of a resource supposed to condone the actions that brought it about? Is arctic hydropower morally unclean or something? Your "peak HN" might have a little backfire to it.
Thanks for inspiring a little fun with the "peak HN" meme:
Huh. I thought the field had mostly soured on wave power due to the incredible engineering challenges. Cheaper+easier to do wind or solar. I guess you can slap “For AI” onto anything to overcome the economics.
I know Microsoft tried it. They had a press release saying it was successful but never did it again. Does anyone know more about that? I agree with you that data centers in the ocean seem a better bet.
> I think the specific attraction to space is the copious massive amounts of free solar energy, isn't it?
Yes you get more energy harvest from solar above the atmosphere and can orient them to always be pointed towards the sun. But it is still so much more expensive than building out conventional solar in the Sun Belt, which is so much more expensive than just building a massive natural gas plant right next to people's homes.
No, space is desirable because there is no local permitting authority that can push back. People living near data centers have gotten wise to the fact that local people pay most of the externalities of data centers and AI, but the benefits mostly go elsewhere, and the jobs created during construction are temporary. In space, you don't have to lobby/bribe local politicians and astroturf a YIMBY movement.
> People living near data centers have gotten wise to the fact that local people pay most of the externalities of data centers and AI, but the benefits mostly go elsewhere.
That's true of just about every industrial, commercial, civic, or residential site. It's the fundamental premise behind every NIMBY protest ever. The benefit of each individual site always runs disproportionately to people further away. It's only in the aggregate, i.e. each individual enjoying the cumulative externalized benefits from far-off, that the equation could ever balance.
Data centers could pay locals a sufficient amount that it overcomes the NIMBY opposition. If you can’t pay locals enough while still generating value for external beneficiaries then the project simply isn’t economical.
That is a problem, but you already have to contend with GPU refresh every ~6 years, it's likely you'd pre-build pods that you could sink and link, then you'd float them and refurbish at refresh time. With that cycle time it's a manageable engineering challenge.
What’s the regulatory path to something like this? Oceans seem to have all the problems of land except manifold: permitting is nigh impossible, and power is hard to line up.
To make it worse, underwater tech is notoriously hard to make operationally visible. Sabotage is trivial and undifferentiable from failure and honest error. When we used to work in trading subsea cable cuts in Asia would constantly ruin our best networks. Everyone had point to point microwave expressly because it wasn’t breakable in this way. Exposing compute to this rather than just networking would have doomed the entire enterprise.
No permits needed in international waters, and PV arrays work fine there.
He should look at renting space on container ships before considering orbital DCs, IMO. But that doesn't satisfy the critical "Rocket company needs something to do" constraint.
There was one barge DC from Nautilus[0]. The problem was to get the amount of power they needed shore power, and fiber from there. Undersea is absolutely crazy to me. But surface vessels are interesting. I wonder what you do: tie a massive gas tanker to a powership (ocean sees night - space doesn't) and then put a container ship full of chips nearby? International waters aren't that far off, so you could reasonably run a fiber line back to shore for interconnect but to get actual full decoupling, I suppose you'd use Starlink.
Sounds terrific actually haha. Boy would that be a sight to behold.
No, you just use solar panels on the container ship. The same ones you'd use on a satellite.
There are thousands of container ships in international waters at any given time, so you wouldn't install a few massive power-hungry data centers on a few ships. You'd put a lot of PV-powered data centers on a lot of ships. Pretend you launched them into space, in other words... but don't actually launch them.
And yes, you'd network them via Starlink, just like the satellites would be.
But ships have night. The PVs would need backup batteries for the entire night-time period to say nothing of the 4x capacity loss. A satellite can just see the sun the whole time and it's getting nice clean sunshine. I think the powership works better.
Regardless, every time this guy does something super capital intensive, it looks stupid and then works out for him. So long as it keeps happening, the probability that he is just much smarter than me and predicting the future better dominates the probability that he keeps getting lucky.
If there's not enough power available on the ship, which for all I know there is (some of them have 100,000-HP engines, or 75+ MW), then you don't bother running the data center at night. Yes, now you need 2x as many of them, but you can afford them since they are 10x cheaper.
Regardless, every time this guy does something super capital intensive, it looks stupid and then works out for him
That's how it looks at first, agreed. But if you look closer, you'll notice something kind of funny. The only times Musk really wins big have been when the competition is either incompetent or lazy (launch services and satellite Internet), or doesn't show up to the game at all (EVs, self-driving and otherwise.)
Data centers and semiconductors aren't like that. Those guys aren't going to stand by passively and let him eat their lunch like General Motors and ULA did.
Haha, I must admit that having 2x ships one on each side of the world and swapping them to keep it flying all the time is definitely good stuff. Very entertaining. And I did forget the engines. It is true, surface vessels do seem to dominate space. Fun chat.
Looking at current memory market. Are we already at point where after decommissioning recycling the memory chips could make economic sense? Maybe with anything else like say if significant amount of copper is used for power or cooling.
With space either you expand even more resources to get stuff back in one piece or it burns... Down on surface you can just ship them to facilities to do this. Maybe even automate lot of parts as these should be standard configurations.
All very interesting, but I'd wait and see what people with real-world experience running Spacecraft can come up with before dismissing the entire endeavor.
The best thing for space GPUs would to run at a much high temperature, thereby allowing the radiator to be fairly small. This would require a special high-temperature GPU, with robust radiation protection and error correction, ideally in solar orbit. I have a video https://youtu.be/s7Mv_OcBXI8 covering the approach for heat rejection.
> At ABI Research, where I work as an aerospace analyst, we did a rough total-cost-of-ownership comparison between a data center on Earth and one in space. It showed that the cost to launch and run a GPU in space for a year is at least an order of magnitude higher than the same feat in a terrestrial data center.
"However, there are niche applications where the much higher costs of computing in space could be justified. Examples include ... active collision avoidance in the increasingly crowded low Earth orbit."
Just so that nobody jumps in with what I first wanted to jump in with, this estimate was done with the assumption that Elon Musk's Starship is built, works as advertised, and launch costs are at the lower end of the projected range.
It wasn't an order of magnitude more because of how expensive rocket launches currently are.
(I'm glad that I read the article before arguing this one...)
I'm not usually an "AI is going to kill us all" kind of person but on the off chance we do get Skynet/etc why would we give the machines the literal high ground?
I think it's less Skynet and more Wintermute: Some people saw the movie Elysium or read a summary of the book Neuromancer, and decided those were aspirational visions of how to be Untouchably Rich In Space.
Though there is a simpler explanation: Some guy with lots of stock in Rocket Launches and Datacenters has an extreme financial incentive to push stories where spending on both things simultaneously is the big new thing.
wouldn't it be nice to blow with some gas a (conductive) balloon around the heat exchanger?
You would increase the external area and heat exchange would be with a gas...
Just out of my mind...maybe silly.
Economics calculator for Orbital vs Terrestrial Data Centers
https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters
You can play around with the cost sliders to estimate the economics, but even being quite optimistic, space data centers cost ~2-3x of their terrestrial counterparts.
To remove heat by radiation there's a big benefit to running the GPUs hotter as the radiation will be proportional to the fourth power of temperature. This resource is using 85 deg C versus 60 deg C for OP which will improve cooling performance.
If Nvidia/SpaceX can make the chips run at a higher temperature that would help a lot although I assume it would have already been done if it were possible. Another option is to add a heat pump to raise radiator temperature if the smaller radiator mass can pay for the heat pump mass.
If radiator temperature is critical you can just run a heat pump to boost it. Modern heat pumps can get pretty close to the Carnot limit for the temperature interval, for example a pump cooling to 300K and dumping out heat at 400K (125°C) will have a theoretical COP limit of 4 and a practical limit of 2.5-3.
That means that for every 3 units of heat your chips emit, you will use a 4th unit to spin the pump. If your panels generate 150kW, you will only have 113kW available for compute and the rest is cooling. Radiators will more than halve vs 340K operation, so it's net beneficial.
It's all a giant techno-economic optimization problem: the extra mass of solar panels you need vs saved radiators vs mass of the pump, the die temperatures you achieve and corresponding performance, durability and chip price point etc.
The answer seems to be large, lightweight sunshades to protect the radiative coolers. That would avoid the degradation due to UV radiation mentioned in the article and would also increase the efficiency of the coolers.
Could they run the chips at "normal" temperatures and then heat pump that all into some other mass that lives at "aerospace alloy" temperatures and radiates it away more efficiently?
I think it's possible, I'm not familiar with what's really been tried but I see that there are some publications on it, for example there's an ESA project under way: https://connectivity.esa.int/archives/projects/heat-pump-cen...
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Sorry but wouldn’t space based DCs need radiation hardened parts which are typically a few generations behind SoTA? Do the centers deploy massive shields to protect the electronics?
I haven't heard of that being a problem for Starlink, whatever they've done there seems to be working. The Orbital AI would be at a higher orbit but still within LEO which reduces the radiation. I wonder if occasional bit flips even matter for typical AI calculations. Quantization seems to suggest a lot of the lower bits aren't all that important. Either way SpaceX has already had success building systems with commercial-off-the-shelf products in space.
To me the biggest problem of the system is the dependence on launch cost. The more launch cost can be lowered the more viable the system is and the more options there are for solving every problem. But IMO the reason Musk is building this system is to lower launch cost. He needs a project that can fund a high volume of launches and create economies of scale to lower launch cost, the way that Starlink did for Falcon 9.
> I haven't heard of that being a problem for Starlink, whatever they've done there seems to be working.
Starlink doesn't need GPUs, they use hardened chips. The first question is, can whatever works as a 2nm GPU work where Starlink is?
The second question is even funnier: Starlink satellites have a limited lifespan and regularly burn up in the atmosphere when they fall back to Earth - that's due to the need to fly them at low altitudes where, coincidentally, the radiation is lower.
Where then will the flying data centers be - high with higher radiation or low with a higher fall rate? And I doubt those heavy birds are going to burn up fully before hitting somebody's head.
But, datacenter development in space does not deal with local NIMBYs, just centralized decision-makers that are easier to "influence".
The NIMBYs are coming for space launch sites, too.
That particular concern is currently covered as far as SpaceX is concerned since it launches under DoD coverage. See the California Coastal Commission and the fact that they had to apologize etc. for attempted overreach.
The point of datacenters in space is about control not economics. They dont want the masses which they are trying to replace with AI and robots to have access to the datacenters running everything.
Why people always take the worst parts of SciFi novels and try to built torment nexus?
Again, we're getting closer to Hyperion Cantos here.
Your view is much more optimistic than mine. For me, they want servers that the police can’t easily seize with keys in memory.
Why did the word "skynet" pop into my mind?
You might be on to something. Starship is moving its launch facility to Florida. Elon previously suspected a sniper shooting at the SpaceX rockets. Moving the launches to Cape Canaveral would make them much harder for a sniper to target. And his terrestrial data centers are easily accessible for anyone who has a grudge with him. Moving those to space would also isolate him from the masses uprising.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/spacex-pushed-sniper-t...
You are altogether externalizing the cost of carbon dioxide emissions that humanity has to pay for. The resulting global warming is not a joke. The heat problem cumulatively is bigger on Earth than it would be in space.
Cost = emmissions
No, cost is not directly proportional to emissions.
Heat emission in space is not problematic for humans
Are you counting the emissions to get the datacenters into space?
That's an environmental and financial cost, but it's a one time cost. For datacenters on Earth, the emissions are continuous.
Are there going to be self sustaining server factories in space? The hw needs updating every few years.
How do we bootstrap to the point where we eventually have factories in space?
If it were up to me, I would be researching and optimizing non-chemical propulsion, also green synthetic fuels for launches. Unfortunately, we will have to leave that for some firm other than SpaceX to develop.
They'll pay the price if it means their data centers are immune to the anger of the commoners who are being surveilled, analyzed, and manipulated by systems running on these data centers.
>their data centers are immune to the anger of the commoners who are being surveilled
If the commoners are attacking infrastructure, there's still always going to be ground stations that can be attacked.
I think the more likely goal would be immunity to regulation.
You can’t release the files the police was never able to seize in the first place.
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I'm still expecting a crypto satellite network to phone app now that normal phones have became satellite connectible. Something outside oversight.
Let's be honest. The only reason orbital data centers are a talking point at all is to justify the stratospheric SpaceX valuation for the IPO. There's literally no other reason.
Everybody who knows anything about data centers understands this. You don't even need to get into the thermodynamics of cooling where the only option is radiating away heat. Terrestial data centers have to use water cooling because the heat generation is so significant.
The real problem is failure. When you have a lot of servers, things fail all the time. Hard drives, SSDs, RAM chips, GPUs, motherboard, etc. Servers are designed to be able to quickly replace parts. If your data center is in orbit, these parts will just fail and there is no repair. There's certainly no economic repair.
If I remember my numbers rightly, at a company like Amazon or Google, the ratio is (IIRC) 1 FTE per 10,000 servers, meaning if you have 10,000 servers, 1 FTE will spend their entire time just replacing parts. A good hardware tech will have a pool of known good parts. When a server detects a fault, they'll go and replace probably everything with known good parts and then figure out what's wrong later. In GPU heavy DCs I suspect 1 FTE can cover fewer than that just because the heat management is much more complicated.
I really can't believe we're still talking about this. It borders on journalistic malpractice to even suggest this is a realistic possibility.
I mean, I think it's cool and a "good idea" in terms of getting off this rock and out into the black.
We can do it, we just have to decide we want to. If we're going to have a Tulip Mania Redux I'd rather have it with space data centers and reusable rockets and autonomous human-level AI moonshots/boondoggles than... I don't know, literal tulips, or factoring large numbers to mine bitcoin or whatever...
Only a single order of magnitude of cost? So a $4b data center on Earth delivers the same value as a $40b data center in Space? So if you have greater than a 95% operating margin and capacity constraints (either due to nation environmental law, power limits, or other such blockers) then this is a no-brainer - a 95% operating margin becomes a 50% operating margin. The return on capital is much much lower so you have to be anticipating cheaper capital, even cheaper costs than this in practice, or something else.
Inference margins are some 70% right now? So it needs quite some work on both sides but this seems to make it seem more achievable than I previously thought.
It assumes $44/kg to launch into orbit. Idk where that came from if it's a musk claim or what but it's ludicrous against current costs. Currently still at thousands/kg and dropping but nowhere near $44 and I haven't heard anyone claim that's likely who isn't selling a rocket company.
That seems pretty cheap, like, can I launch my cat's ashes into space or something for $50?
The plan is to launch from Earth in the beginning stages and then switch to launching from the Moon which has no atmosphere so you don't need rockets and can use an electromagnetic gun instead. That requires satellite manufacturing on the Moon and I guess the minerals required will come from asteroid mining.
That's my understanding of what Elon said about how it's going to work.
So the majority of the hardware should stay on the moon where latency isn't so critical. There the cooling won't be the problem.
Elon said they will manufacture big heavy parts on the Moon to reduce the mass they need to use rockets for and maybe ship GPUs from Earth. It sounds like a science-fiction to me but what do I know. You can watch the full interview here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_1j5dVWNYI
Asteroid mining? This is the most ridiculous thing ever. How this half baked snake oil salesman gets anyone to invest in his companies amazes me.
Musk is deliberately creating a business that needs high volume low cost launch services because in order to get low cost launch high volume is needed, and in order to get high volume a customer is needed. In the same way that Starlink launches were used to create the Falcon 9 economies of scale, the orbital AI will be used to create the Starship economies of scale. He also wants to bet the whole company on this which creates pressure to deliver and not just coast on what they've already accomplished. There are a bunch of related high risk bets but they ultimately connect back to bringing Mars within reach with frequent low cost launch capability.
> the orbital AI will be used to create the Starship economies of scale.
The difference is that Starlink solves a problem people actually have. Space AI solves very few real problems (immunity from regulation, physical security)
>So a $4b data center on Earth delivers the same value as a $40b data center in Space?
It may do so, initially, compared to a new-build DC.
But, critically, you can upgrade the racks in an already-built DC without demolishing the entire building. You can't do that in orbit, so the full lifecycle ROI is lower.
Orbital DCs are constrained by cooling and by bandwidth. Even a space-to-ground laser (which does not currently exist in a sufficiently-mature form) has a fraction of the bandwidth of a proper terrestrial fiber line. So you're paying at least 10x for essentially a disposable datacenter that can't move as much data in or out, and likely will not be as powerful as a terrestrial DC because of the cooling constraint, just to have it in space because reasons.
I don't see the business case, at all.
This is so transparently another hyperloop-esque pipe dream invented for the sole purpose of inflating SpaceX's valuation.
Remember space manufacturing? When the first modules of ISS were launched 27 years ago, that was supposed to be the next big thing. Space manufacturing, asteroid mining, and space data centers are pipedreams. The capital equipment is too heavy, and 100% forever automated operations are not realistic.
Space manufacturing has always been fun one. It is like people have no understanding just how complex the supply chains for well anything we make these days are. Just look at COVID and hit on JIT.
Mining is also hard and harsh. One of the more hostile environments to operate for machinery. Lot of mechanical wear. And having that in space makes any maintenance extremely harder...
Maybe once we can do all that fully autonomously and by that I mean with near zero non-remote intervention we might start thinking about space...
It's still full of delicious rocks with completely insane market value. They sit there waiting for our greed and capabilities to reach escape velocity. Some day there will be a TEMU space station drop shipping custom fidget spinners to wherever we desire them. Probably not any time soon but eventually...
There's also the issue of scaling. Say you can make the engineering work for building a data center in space.
Nobody wants to build just one, or even just a handful. Musk has talked about 10000 launches a year for deploying and maintaining data centers.
At that scale pollution becomes a serious issue. It hasn't been a problem so far because we haven't launched a lot of rockets. Cumulatively the world has under about 8000 orbital launches and under 40000 launches that were not orbital but reached the stratosphere.
Orbital rocket emissions have an impact far beyond what you might expect just from looking at the mass of what they emit, because they emit much of it the upper atmosphere. Many things that when emitted near the surface are only a local problem become a global problem if you emit them in the upper atmosphere.
There are non-polluting ways of launching. SpinLaunch
SpinLaunch has several fatal flaws.
Hidrogen fuel
Tyranny of the rocket equation[0] makes it hard for me to conceive how an orbital data centre could ever make sense.
If you just want to escape permitting laws, why not float it in international waters? That's a much more accessible and hospitable environment than LEO.
[0] https://archive.is/qp4gP
Space gets you 24/7 solar power. To run a data center for 12 hours without sunlight, you'd need massive batteries. Also oceans have weather and corrosion.
The issue with putting stuff in space isn't the kinetic energy required. In LEO that's about 30 megajoules per kilogram or $5 worth of propellant. The issue is that orbital launch vehicles are not reusable, so you must destroy an expensive rocket to get your payload to orbit. All of these space datacenter efforts are betting that Starship will be fully reusable.
You can't just sea-stead your way to it though, salt water + network accessibility + literal piracy + how much data you can move + the environmental toll of doing much of anything on the see = equally crazy challenges with more laws that can stop you.
By the time you got permission to lay all the cables you'd need to lay, etc. your competition would already be done with their space data center, or Lunar one in a peak of eternal sunshine or whatever. This is a race to the most compute. Whoever gets the most geniuses in their "country of geniuses in a datacenter" wins.
Wins what? Well, everything they want effectively forever.
Why is everyone so focused on heat when cosmic rays randomly scrambling memory is going to be a much bigger problem?
When I was peripherally working on some HPC stuff, there was a comment by one of the hardware guys that it mattered which national lab you were building the supercomputer for, because the guys at high altitude like Los Alamos get a lot more bitflips than someone closer to sea-level like Argonne. Although that said, for an exascale supercomputer, the mean time between uncorrected bit flip somewhere in the machine is on the order of a few hours, which means that large supercomputer-scale workloads should actually expect to hit a bit flip in their computation.
Cosmic rays can probably be resolved with some parity bits and redundancy. Especially since these don't have to be located way up in geosynch, lower orbits get you more magnetosphere protection.
Not that it isn't a problem, but I think heat dissipation will have the edge.
I worked at the architecture level on designs to mitigate signal corruption inside the asic. I don't remember the exact numbers, and obviously it depends on the design. but you need to add error detection and correction on every path (busses, mixes, registers, function units, etc). the number I seem to recall was a 25% area overhead and a nominal decrease in clock rate. this was for an earth-bound very large machine, so idk if that would be sufficient for space. usually those designs have much larger nodes and much slower clock rates. primarily because of damage caused by ionizing radiation that accumulates over time.
so sure, the heat issue seems fatal, but rad-hard designs will certainly have a bottom line impact
You can also place the most sensitive electronics inside a module within the propellant tank. That also should help a lot.
You're gonna need a lot more than a parity bit.
I mean, LLMs are already a pile of stochastic output .. maybe that just adds to the fun? /s
Finally, the classic BOFH excuse of sunspots causing issues will be true
I'm excited I think of the Cowboy Bebop episode (Jamming With Edward) where they hunt down a rogue satellite to get data off it.
Also think it would be crazy to have a worm spread across the servers/starlink, would there be an antivirus system onboard or maybe not applicable, says RTOS can get a virus
Science fiction beat the author of this article to the punch re: novel cooling solutions in space. The author proposes squirting oil from one arm, through open vacuum, to another arm - the oil droplets radiate the heat en route from arm 1 to arm 2. However, like most modern tech, science fiction writing has anticipated it. In the book Saturns Run (2015), by John Stanford and Ctien, their spaceship cools down it's megawatt nuclear reactor by using a eutectic metal as coolant, which runs as a molten ribbon through open vacuum from arm 1 to arm 2.
Space datacenters make no sense. Build them in the oceans? Then you can actually fix them as well.
How would you power them in the ocean? One of the attractions of space is the free power (the other apparently being less regulations, which may also not apply to the ocean).
I don't know if Musk, or anyone else, has talked about the economics of not being able to (economically) fix things in space. Presumably the idea would be to avoid components that fail more rapidly like mechanical hard drives (use SSDs instead), and to have redundancy so that even if one component fails it doesn't mean the whole satellite/node is now useless.
He must have done the math that at the anticipated failure rate each satellite would pay for itself before failing and needing to be replaced.
Honestly, data centers in the ocean make so much more sense than data centers in space it's kind of silly, but Mr Moneybags owns a rocket company he's trying to pump and dump, not a submarine company, so here we are.
It's like the idea of Mars as a backup to human civilization. The technology required to make Mars livable and independent from Earth is so advanced it would allow you to survive basically anything here on Earth already.
I would suggest data centres near the arctic - it's close to most of the Northern hemisphere's users, presents an easy option for cooling (the place is a heat sink), and, with collapsing glaciers, there will be abundant hydro power to be used.
It has the killer feature of allowing a human to walk up to a rack and replace a component.
A problem with the arctic, is that infrastructure becomes a problem the longer north you go. Even in western countries like Norway, the power grid is simply too small to handle any data center in the northern-most counties. Not to mention the political issue, where those living there would face higher utility bills.
It is assumed that if you want to build lots of data centers up north, you also need to invest in infrastructure. I've seen discussion about smaller modular nuclear power plants, but those things take years. Another thing could be other renewable energy sources.
One huge advantage of ocean data centers is that you can do geothermal down there more cheaply and easily, and it's a very consistent source of power, so you don't even need hydro. Additionally, deep ocean water is consistently very near freezing, you could get below freezing out of the water but then you lose conduction efficiency.
The replacability is nice, but even in terrestrial data centers there are situations where something fails and it never gets replaced, just routed around, until the pod gets ripped out and replaced in its entirety.
NIMBY stuff is an issue too, I live in AK and would love if we started building them, but there are infrastructure problems and then people who have never worked in the arctic frantically pitching a fit about caribou they’ve never seen.
NIMBY stuff is why we will go to space. In space nobody can tell you “no.”
>I would suggest data centres near the arctic - it's close to most of the Northern hemisphere's users, presents an easy option for cooling (the place is a heat sink), and, with collapsing glaciers, there will be abundant hydro power to be used.
Advocating for exacerbating the melting of the polar ice cap, which will endanger dozens of millions of people, just to have more convenient data centers for manufacturing AI slop, is peak HN.
If they are going to build them, they might as well build them in a place that could use extra power and where cooling would use less energy.
stackghost, if they use less cooling power, how is that exacerbating melting ice caps? And how is making use of a resource supposed to condone the actions that brought it about? Is arctic hydropower morally unclean or something? Your "peak HN" might have a little backfire to it.
Thanks for inspiring a little fun with the "peak HN" meme:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
A startup I worked at is building wave-powered data centers [1].
1: https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/catalyst-building-inferen...
Huh. I thought the field had mostly soured on wave power due to the incredible engineering challenges. Cheaper+easier to do wind or solar. I guess you can slap “For AI” onto anything to overcome the economics.
They have a unique design where only a turbine moves with very cheap electricity produced.
AI inference gives them a great way to turn revenue from cheap electricity without solving the device-to-shore problem yet for that energy.
I know Microsoft tried it. They had a press release saying it was successful but never did it again. Does anyone know more about that? I agree with you that data centers in the ocean seem a better bet.
I saw this a couple of days ago, you might be interested: 'World’s first wind-powered underwater datacentre starts operating in China' [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/09/worlds-first-w...
Corrosion is one hell of a problem in salt water.
I think the specific attraction to space is the copious massive amounts of free solar energy, isn't it?
(In reality, they want to build the torment nexus at the Lagrange points because that would just be edgy-as-fuck)
> I think the specific attraction to space is the copious massive amounts of free solar energy, isn't it?
Yes you get more energy harvest from solar above the atmosphere and can orient them to always be pointed towards the sun. But it is still so much more expensive than building out conventional solar in the Sun Belt, which is so much more expensive than just building a massive natural gas plant right next to people's homes.
No, space is desirable because there is no local permitting authority that can push back. People living near data centers have gotten wise to the fact that local people pay most of the externalities of data centers and AI, but the benefits mostly go elsewhere, and the jobs created during construction are temporary. In space, you don't have to lobby/bribe local politicians and astroturf a YIMBY movement.
> People living near data centers have gotten wise to the fact that local people pay most of the externalities of data centers and AI, but the benefits mostly go elsewhere.
That's true of just about every industrial, commercial, civic, or residential site. It's the fundamental premise behind every NIMBY protest ever. The benefit of each individual site always runs disproportionately to people further away. It's only in the aggregate, i.e. each individual enjoying the cumulative externalized benefits from far-off, that the equation could ever balance.
Data centers could pay locals a sufficient amount that it overcomes the NIMBY opposition. If you can’t pay locals enough while still generating value for external beneficiaries then the project simply isn’t economical.
That is a problem, but you already have to contend with GPU refresh every ~6 years, it's likely you'd pre-build pods that you could sink and link, then you'd float them and refurbish at refresh time. With that cycle time it's a manageable engineering challenge.
What’s the regulatory path to something like this? Oceans seem to have all the problems of land except manifold: permitting is nigh impossible, and power is hard to line up.
To make it worse, underwater tech is notoriously hard to make operationally visible. Sabotage is trivial and undifferentiable from failure and honest error. When we used to work in trading subsea cable cuts in Asia would constantly ruin our best networks. Everyone had point to point microwave expressly because it wasn’t breakable in this way. Exposing compute to this rather than just networking would have doomed the entire enterprise.
No permits needed in international waters, and PV arrays work fine there.
He should look at renting space on container ships before considering orbital DCs, IMO. But that doesn't satisfy the critical "Rocket company needs something to do" constraint.
There was one barge DC from Nautilus[0]. The problem was to get the amount of power they needed shore power, and fiber from there. Undersea is absolutely crazy to me. But surface vessels are interesting. I wonder what you do: tie a massive gas tanker to a powership (ocean sees night - space doesn't) and then put a container ship full of chips nearby? International waters aren't that far off, so you could reasonably run a fiber line back to shore for interconnect but to get actual full decoupling, I suppose you'd use Starlink.
Sounds terrific actually haha. Boy would that be a sight to behold.
0: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nautilus-puts-sto...
No, you just use solar panels on the container ship. The same ones you'd use on a satellite.
There are thousands of container ships in international waters at any given time, so you wouldn't install a few massive power-hungry data centers on a few ships. You'd put a lot of PV-powered data centers on a lot of ships. Pretend you launched them into space, in other words... but don't actually launch them.
And yes, you'd network them via Starlink, just like the satellites would be.
But ships have night. The PVs would need backup batteries for the entire night-time period to say nothing of the 4x capacity loss. A satellite can just see the sun the whole time and it's getting nice clean sunshine. I think the powership works better.
Regardless, every time this guy does something super capital intensive, it looks stupid and then works out for him. So long as it keeps happening, the probability that he is just much smarter than me and predicting the future better dominates the probability that he keeps getting lucky.
If there's not enough power available on the ship, which for all I know there is (some of them have 100,000-HP engines, or 75+ MW), then you don't bother running the data center at night. Yes, now you need 2x as many of them, but you can afford them since they are 10x cheaper.
Regardless, every time this guy does something super capital intensive, it looks stupid and then works out for him
That's how it looks at first, agreed. But if you look closer, you'll notice something kind of funny. The only times Musk really wins big have been when the competition is either incompetent or lazy (launch services and satellite Internet), or doesn't show up to the game at all (EVs, self-driving and otherwise.)
Data centers and semiconductors aren't like that. Those guys aren't going to stand by passively and let him eat their lunch like General Motors and ULA did.
Haha, I must admit that having 2x ships one on each side of the world and swapping them to keep it flying all the time is definitely good stuff. Very entertaining. And I did forget the engines. It is true, surface vessels do seem to dominate space. Fun chat.
He must have that cave submarine lying around somewhere.
“Solved problem”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain
It merely remains to build one.
Silly human, won't be us building that. Just hope that you get one of the nice gilded cages!
Looking at current memory market. Are we already at point where after decommissioning recycling the memory chips could make economic sense? Maybe with anything else like say if significant amount of copper is used for power or cooling.
With space either you expand even more resources to get stuff back in one piece or it burns... Down on surface you can just ship them to facilities to do this. Maybe even automate lot of parts as these should be standard configurations.
All very interesting, but I'd wait and see what people with real-world experience running Spacecraft can come up with before dismissing the entire endeavor.
The best thing for space GPUs would to run at a much high temperature, thereby allowing the radiator to be fairly small. This would require a special high-temperature GPU, with robust radiation protection and error correction, ideally in solar orbit. I have a video https://youtu.be/s7Mv_OcBXI8 covering the approach for heat rejection.
> At ABI Research, where I work as an aerospace analyst, we did a rough total-cost-of-ownership comparison between a data center on Earth and one in space. It showed that the cost to launch and run a GPU in space for a year is at least an order of magnitude higher than the same feat in a terrestrial data center.
And in the next paragraph:
"However, there are niche applications where the much higher costs of computing in space could be justified. Examples include ... active collision avoidance in the increasingly crowded low Earth orbit."
A self-justifying purpose!
Just so that nobody jumps in with what I first wanted to jump in with, this estimate was done with the assumption that Elon Musk's Starship is built, works as advertised, and launch costs are at the lower end of the projected range.
It wasn't an order of magnitude more because of how expensive rocket launches currently are.
(I'm glad that I read the article before arguing this one...)
I'm not usually an "AI is going to kill us all" kind of person but on the off chance we do get Skynet/etc why would we give the machines the literal high ground?
I think it's less Skynet and more Wintermute: Some people saw the movie Elysium or read a summary of the book Neuromancer, and decided those were aspirational visions of how to be Untouchably Rich In Space.
Though there is a simpler explanation: Some guy with lots of stock in Rocket Launches and Datacenters has an extreme financial incentive to push stories where spending on both things simultaneously is the big new thing.
there has been a lot of pushback about building new data centers basically anywhere on earth might as well build them in space.
Because that's the next generation's problem, and we can do more to mortgage their future for our own luxury :)
I appreciate the sci-fi quality of this but when the IPO comes remember the "fi" stands for "fiction."
Anyone know why everyone focuses on the radiators, when the solar panels are significantly larger?
Gravity. That's what rules orbital-anything.
wouldn't it be nice to blow with some gas a (conductive) balloon around the heat exchanger? You would increase the external area and heat exchange would be with a gas... Just out of my mind...maybe silly.
>Why Orbital Data Centers Are Harder Than Silicon Valley Thinks
Who thinks they are easy? Elon Musk? The guy that spews obvious (even to him) bullshit like we're going to Mars in the next 5 years?
I don't even want to read the article. It is obvious that Orbital Data Centers have MASSIVE engineering challenges. They may never be cost-effective.