AI data-centers use upwards of 100MW. The biggest solar panels in space could produce around 240KW. When they speak of AI data-centers in space what do they actually mean in realistic non theoretical terms and where are the materials for this coming from?
If the AI data-center used only 10MW then each could have two redundant SMR's assuming the cooling challenges have been worked out but then we could have nuclear reactor disposal and collision issues.
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 this challenge.
Once you have solutions, it turns into a cost problem. And if that cost is too high (for whatever arbitrary threshold you use for that) it becomes an optimization problem.
This whole thread reads like a lot of "but ... but ... but ...". It all boils down to people assuming things about what is too much or too hard. And it's all meaningless unless you actually bother to articulate those assumptions. What exactly is too hard here? What would it take to address those issues? What would the cost be? Put some numbers on it. There are also all sorts of assumptions about what is valuable and what isn't. You can't say something is too hard or too costly without making assertions about what is worth paying for and what isn't.
The answers are going to be boring. We need X amounts of giga tons launched to orbit at Y amount of dollars. OK great. What happens if launch cost drops by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude? What happens if the amount of mass needed drops because of some engineering innovation? Massively dropping launch cost is roughly what SpaceX is proposing to do with Star Ship. Is it still "too hard"? You can't have that debate until you put numbers on your assertions.
There's a bit of back of the envelope math involved here but we're roughly talking about a million satellites. In the order of ~2.5 million tonnes of mass (at 2.5 ton per satellite). Tens of thousands of Star Ship launches basically. It's definitely a big project. We're talking about 1-2 order magnitude increase of the scale of operations for SpaceX going from lower hundreds to thousands of launches per year spread over maybe 10-15 years to work up to a million satellites.
I'm more worried about what all that mass is going to do when it burns up in the atmosphere / drops in the oceans. At that scale it's no longer just a drop in the ocean.
How about we just make a giant heatsink that reaches into space instead. Then we can cool the whole planet. Coming up with crazy ideas is cheap, but the logistics are obviously impractical.
It possibly makes sense if you're preparing for war, harder to hit, harder to physically break into, beyond the range of nuclear EMP, and accessible from anywhere on earth.
> on 21 February 2008, the US Navy destroyed USA-193 in Operation Burnt Frost, using a ship-fired RIM-161 Standard Missile 3 about 247 km (153 mi) above the Pacific Ocean.
What’s there not to like? Superconductors. Free electricity. No cooling necessary.
Put those three together and maybe it’s possible to push physics to its limits. Faster networking, maybe 4x-5x capacity per unit compared to earth. Servicing is a pain, might be cheaper to just replace the hardware when a node goes bad.
But it mainly makes sense to those who have the capability and can do it cheaply (compared to the rest). There’s only one company that I can think of and that is SpaceX. They are closing in on (or passed) 8,000 satellites. Vertical integration means their cost-base will always be less than any competitor.
To Steelman the topic, Musk’s whole alleged mission is to make humans a multi-planet species that can survive an earth killing event.
To that end, a small data center space isn’t about unit-economics, it’s a bigger mission. So the question we should consider is what can we put into space the further that mission. Can we put a meaningful sum of human knowledge out there for preservation? It sounds like “yes,” even if we can’t train ChatGPT models out there yet.
A sum or product of human knowledge is not humanity: that specific mission (putting it into space for preservation or contact) has been done (Voyagers and others) and is done continuously (radiowaves).
Making a dent into making humans a multiplanetary species requires making a lot of companion species as well; the task requires much more elementary stuff (relative to the mission), at the ground level, than Musk is demonstrating to do (at technical, entrepreneurial and political level).
This is a con, from the start. It just worked so far so some people fall for it.
I'd be curious to know simply how large the thermal radiator necessary to keep a typical GPU server cooled would be. Do they completely dwarf the server size? Can you do something with some esoteric material that is not particularly load-bearing but holds up well in space to get around some of these challenges?
Data centers in space are the logical progression from the multi trillion business of m2m and edge computing. It removes all physical limits to investment.
Is there any insight into how Starlink solved cooling? One 'expert' insisted that there is no reason to expect that data center satellites would generate any more heat than starlinks.
- Data centres need a lot of power = giant vast solar panels
- Data centres need a lot of cooling. That's some almighty heatsinks you're going need
- They will need to be radiation-hardened to avoid memory corruption = even more mass
- The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and will need replacing to stay competitive
- Data centres are about 100x bigger (not including solar panels and heat sinks) than the biggest thing we've ever put in space
Tesla is losing market share (and rank increasingly poorly against alternatives), his robots are gonna fail, this datacentre ambition needs to break the laws of physics, grok/twitter is a fake news pedo-loving cesspit that's gonna be regulated into oblivion. Its only down from here on out.
I'm convinced that >30% of this comes from ideas leaking out of fiction such as like Neuromancer, and percolating through the minds of wealthy people attracted to some of the concepts. Namely, the dream of being a hyper-wealthy dynasty, above any earthly government, controlling an extraterritorial Las Vegas Fiefdom In Space. (Which in the book, also hosted a powerful AI.)
Then they work backwards, trying to figure out some economic engine to make it happen. "Data centers" are (A) in-vogue for investment right now and (B) vaguely plausible, at least compared to having a space-casino.
Anti satellite weapons are a thing. Besides, the more vulnerable part becomes you as a person rather than the equipment. There's no space colony yet, and even if there is, the supplies can be easily held hostage by an earthly government too.
He is very influenced by The Culture of Iain Banks. They're really good sci-fi... and describe a hedonistic world where machines do the hard thinking and bidding of the biologicals.
> Musk pointed to The Culture series by Iain M. Banks as his best “imagining” of this world. The science fiction novels depict a utopian future where citizens can have virtually anything they want thanks to AI—making money obsolete and leaving citizens free to spend their time doing whatever they love.
I am surprised the space casino hasn't been done to be honest. Or some kind of space resort. I guess we are stepping across the stepping stones now, with private space flights, and private space fairing companies. Maybe it is just a matter of time before the Crystal Palace sees its first billionare clients.
“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.” ― William Gibson, Count Zero
Some of it might come from True Names by Vernor Vinge too, where the cheapest place to buy bulk compute is giant satellites orbiting on geosync orbit. This became possible because they were developed early on for communications, then obsoleted by Starlink-like LEO constellations, so they have a ton of spare undesirable high-latency capacity to sell. In this fictional world, ground-based fiber optic networks never happened, at least not at the kind of scale they did in the real world.
But because that's fiction, Vinge can just handwave away all the hard engineering problems for sci-fi flavor.
*Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers*.
Disagree there are bunch of scenarios where Data Centers in space make sense. Like nuclear annihilation and having vaults across the globe to communicate and get back lost information because ground data centers would be wiped out by EMP from blasts.
It doesn't make any sense to me either, but there are lots of things like that where the other thing is harder. As an example, a thing people say online a lot is something like "Why do the techbros build self-driving cars instead of just putting it on rails for efficiency and then they could call it a TRAIN?"
The answer to that is that coordination problems are really hard. Much harder even than what are currently unsolved engineering problems. In fact, SpaceX can only launch from California because they have DOD coverage for their launches. Otherwise the California Coastal Commission et al. would have blocked them entirely. Perhaps the innovation for affordable space Internet is combining it with mixed-use technology.
The truth is that in America today self-driving cars (regulated by a state board run by bureaucrats) are easier to build than trains (regulated by every property owner on the train route). Mark Zuckerberg tried to spend some money evaluating a train across the Bay and had to give up. But Robotaxi service is live in San Francisco.
So if there is an angle that makes sense to me it's that they anticipate engineering challenges beatable in a way where regulatory challenges are not.
The bigger issue: datacenters in space are disposable. All the extremely recyclable aluminum, silica - you extract it, manufacture it and instead of recycling it when it’s done you incinerate it in the atmosphere and scatter the ashes far and wide across the earth, the harder to recapture later.
You do this when the most fragile part in the system fails. Solar panels good for 25 years but the SSDs burn out after 2? Incinerate the lot!
This kind of thinking is late capitalist brain rot. This kind of waste should be a crime.
I am willing to bet the whole xAI/SpaceX merger is simply a ploy by Musk to evade releasing accurate historical information about SpaceX's finances. How much did it actually cost SpaceX to launch a kilogram of payload into space each year? How much is NASA actually donating them, per each year?
I mean, I still remember promises of $1000-per-kg for space launches, and how e.g. Gigafactory will produce half of the world battery supply, and other non-scientific fiction peddled by Musk. Remember when SpaceX suggested in 2019 that the US Army could use its Starship rockets to transport troops and supplies across the planet in minutes? I do. By the way, have they finished testing Starship yet, is it ready?
Space offers some unique benefits that enable computing that’s impossible or very hard to do on earth. E.g. Super conducting computing is possible, which can be thousands times to millions times faster than current CPU while using very little energy. When the satellite moves in the shade of the earth, temperature drops significantly. It can be low enough to enable superconducting. When the satellite moves under the sun, the solar panel can start charging up the battery to power the ongoing operation.
326 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadIf the AI data-center used only 10MW then each could have two redundant SMR's assuming the cooling challenges have been worked out but then we could have nuclear reactor disposal and collision issues.
Once you have solutions, it turns into a cost problem. And if that cost is too high (for whatever arbitrary threshold you use for that) it becomes an optimization problem.
This whole thread reads like a lot of "but ... but ... but ...". It all boils down to people assuming things about what is too much or too hard. And it's all meaningless unless you actually bother to articulate those assumptions. What exactly is too hard here? What would it take to address those issues? What would the cost be? Put some numbers on it. There are also all sorts of assumptions about what is valuable and what isn't. You can't say something is too hard or too costly without making assertions about what is worth paying for and what isn't.
The answers are going to be boring. We need X amounts of giga tons launched to orbit at Y amount of dollars. OK great. What happens if launch cost drops by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude? What happens if the amount of mass needed drops because of some engineering innovation? Massively dropping launch cost is roughly what SpaceX is proposing to do with Star Ship. Is it still "too hard"? You can't have that debate until you put numbers on your assertions.
There's a bit of back of the envelope math involved here but we're roughly talking about a million satellites. In the order of ~2.5 million tonnes of mass (at 2.5 ton per satellite). Tens of thousands of Star Ship launches basically. It's definitely a big project. We're talking about 1-2 order magnitude increase of the scale of operations for SpaceX going from lower hundreds to thousands of launches per year spread over maybe 10-15 years to work up to a million satellites.
I'm more worried about what all that mass is going to do when it burns up in the atmosphere / drops in the oceans. At that scale it's no longer just a drop in the ocean.
press x to doubt
> on 21 February 2008, the US Navy destroyed USA-193 in Operation Burnt Frost, using a ship-fired RIM-161 Standard Missile 3 about 247 km (153 mi) above the Pacific Ocean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon
Put those three together and maybe it’s possible to push physics to its limits. Faster networking, maybe 4x-5x capacity per unit compared to earth. Servicing is a pain, might be cheaper to just replace the hardware when a node goes bad.
But it mainly makes sense to those who have the capability and can do it cheaply (compared to the rest). There’s only one company that I can think of and that is SpaceX. They are closing in on (or passed) 8,000 satellites. Vertical integration means their cost-base will always be less than any competitor.
To that end, a small data center space isn’t about unit-economics, it’s a bigger mission. So the question we should consider is what can we put into space the further that mission. Can we put a meaningful sum of human knowledge out there for preservation? It sounds like “yes,” even if we can’t train ChatGPT models out there yet.
Making a dent into making humans a multiplanetary species requires making a lot of companion species as well; the task requires much more elementary stuff (relative to the mission), at the ground level, than Musk is demonstrating to do (at technical, entrepreneurial and political level).
This is a con, from the start. It just worked so far so some people fall for it.
- Data centres need a lot of power = giant vast solar panels
- Data centres need a lot of cooling. That's some almighty heatsinks you're going need
- They will need to be radiation-hardened to avoid memory corruption = even more mass
- The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and will need replacing to stay competitive
- Data centres are about 100x bigger (not including solar panels and heat sinks) than the biggest thing we've ever put in space
Tesla is losing market share (and rank increasingly poorly against alternatives), his robots are gonna fail, this datacentre ambition needs to break the laws of physics, grok/twitter is a fake news pedo-loving cesspit that's gonna be regulated into oblivion. Its only down from here on out.
Then they work backwards, trying to figure out some economic engine to make it happen. "Data centers" are (A) in-vogue for investment right now and (B) vaguely plausible, at least compared to having a space-casino.
Anti satellite weapons are a thing. Besides, the more vulnerable part becomes you as a person rather than the equipment. There's no space colony yet, and even if there is, the supplies can be easily held hostage by an earthly government too.
https://recommentions.com/elon-musk/books/culture-by-iain-ba...
https://www.vox.com/culture/413502/iain-banks-culture-series...
https://fortune.com/2025/12/15/billionaire-elon-musk-say-tha...
> Musk pointed to The Culture series by Iain M. Banks as his best “imagining” of this world. The science fiction novels depict a utopian future where citizens can have virtually anything they want thanks to AI—making money obsolete and leaving citizens free to spend their time doing whatever they love.
But because that's fiction, Vinge can just handwave away all the hard engineering problems for sci-fi flavor.
Disagree there are bunch of scenarios where Data Centers in space make sense. Like nuclear annihilation and having vaults across the globe to communicate and get back lost information because ground data centers would be wiped out by EMP from blasts.
(If you can't xcancel it yourself your hacker card is revoked.)
The answer to that is that coordination problems are really hard. Much harder even than what are currently unsolved engineering problems. In fact, SpaceX can only launch from California because they have DOD coverage for their launches. Otherwise the California Coastal Commission et al. would have blocked them entirely. Perhaps the innovation for affordable space Internet is combining it with mixed-use technology.
The truth is that in America today self-driving cars (regulated by a state board run by bureaucrats) are easier to build than trains (regulated by every property owner on the train route). Mark Zuckerberg tried to spend some money evaluating a train across the Bay and had to give up. But Robotaxi service is live in San Francisco.
So if there is an angle that makes sense to me it's that they anticipate engineering challenges beatable in a way where regulatory challenges are not.
You do this when the most fragile part in the system fails. Solar panels good for 25 years but the SSDs burn out after 2? Incinerate the lot!
This kind of thinking is late capitalist brain rot. This kind of waste should be a crime.
I mean, I still remember promises of $1000-per-kg for space launches, and how e.g. Gigafactory will produce half of the world battery supply, and other non-scientific fiction peddled by Musk. Remember when SpaceX suggested in 2019 that the US Army could use its Starship rockets to transport troops and supplies across the planet in minutes? I do. By the way, have they finished testing Starship yet, is it ready?
Just do the basic thermal heat transfer math.