The reasons against doing this is obvious. Is there any coherent description of why someone would think it is a good idea? And I don't mean, like, delusional reasons, but an actually rational argument for "here is where it might work out and we need to try and measure to find out".
What are the obvious reasons against it? I've heard lots of arguments that cooling will be a hard technical challenge and, given current equipment weights and launch costs, it's uneconomical. But is there an obvious reason this would be impossible?
Lots of technologies start out looking hard and economically infeasible. But if you invest in development, you're able to get a few breakthroughs, and suddenly, it's economically viable.
If they do get things to work out, the benefits seem obvious: 24/7 access to clean energy, not upsetting the people who'd rather not have a datacenter next door (or in the same state), and plenty of space to scale up.
The obvious argument in favor that I see: Seizing such a data center is exceedingly difficult and destroying one would be a major international incident
Google's blog post (https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/go...) describes the goal of the launch as "designed to gather in-orbit data on how our TPUs handle the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of space." That doesn't sound like a bad idea, obviously it might be useful to have dedicated machine learning hardware on spacecraft or satellites for local processing. Maybe they just framed it as an orbital data center test for marketing, because that's a trendy topic and sounds more newsworthy than "hardware durability test"?
It still doesn’t make sense to me. Technological progress will likely only accelerate. These will be outdated within 2 years easily, and you can’t even recover the chips. The only benefits are the unlimited power without the bottlenecks on earth, lack of political pressure of course, and the low latency for processing satellite data since it doesn’t need to be sent down to earth. These don’t seem beneficial enough to waste this money. It would be good to hear from someone who knows more about this.
GPUs aren’t becoming outdated in practice. An H100 still rents for something like $3/hour. The only reason to take them offline today would be due to limited data centre capacity. In space, that doesn’t apply.
For now, at least, this market doesn’t behave like the one for CPUs which are more fungible and general purpose.
Rather than thinking about the value of a GPU over time, it’s more useful to think about the value of a model (or generation of models) that will run on the GPU.
Sol 6 launched last week. People will build products/agents/systems on Sol 6. Many of those will end up staying on that model for the lifetime of the end product (due to working well enough), which means there will be long-term demand for the model, and that means long-term demand for the GPU set that the model runs on.
For now, at least, models are tuned to a specific GPU and don’t move to the newest hardware very easily.
How does capacity not apply in space? You can’t just boost a gpu into orbit and it’ll start running. It needs to be hooked into power and cooling infrastructure still and that will always be limited by how much infrastructure you have up there.
I'm guessing this is part of the whole idea; to get data before its actually doable, and the cost is worth the early data to help with future development
Not just that, you’re wasting so much compute due to the risk of bit flips. That the case for any hardware you currently have in space, you need some correction mechanism which generally mean computing the same thing multiple times just to ensure correctness. And the cooling story without an atmosphere is also another obvious pretty massive problem
Elon lets out a fart and everyone's running after it. This is another misguided attempt to pump-up their share price or give clueless investors the feeling that Google is leading the A.I. pack.
Orbital data centers are a stupid idea conjured up by Musk when he was taking mescaline or ketamine. Anyone with half a brain knows this doesn't make sense.
This definitely feels like Hyperloop, but for data centers instead - a really cool idea that falls apart the moment it meets contact with reality. The most bizarre thing is how any of this and the Hyperloop got any amount of funding and development beyond just an initial feasibility report.
The idea of "orbital data centers" was conjured up merely to justify Musk's merging of xAI and SpaceX. I thought that was obvious to everyone but apparently there are still plenty of little-minded people that see Musk as some sort of God and suck up every lie he tells them.
Muak is merging all his failed enterprises (Tesla, xAI, Boring Company, Twitter) into to the one that's been relatively succesful, SpaceX, mostly because of Starlink the idea for which he himself didn't even come up with and was initially seen as an afterthought to get some revenue.
Genuine question: why are there so many people up-in-arms on orbital data centers? Like they have a personally vested interest in ensuring their opinions on failure are correct? There are many people on HN that despise it and say it will not and will never work, but here we are, they are flying them up to space and presumably, will start working soon.
The hardest thing about AI datacenters is power. The second hardest thing is cooling. All of these are physical challenges and exponentially harder in space.
So why do it? Because datacenter regulations on earth are becoming a referendum by proxy on AI. "Texas has no jurisdiction in low earth orbit!" is the general idea. Critics point out that this is a transparent move to moot the argument over AI, and that it doesn't even work in principle, due to above mentioned physics.
Oh I'm just against it because I love the night sky and I don't want it littered with even more trash from obscenely rich American oligarchs. This tech doesn't help me, or anyone that is not in power. Instead it (and light pollution, but that at least not everywhere on the planet) destroys one of the few things that is there, commonly available for everyone to enjoy: the majestic view of the night sky.
> Like they have a personally vested interest in ensuring their opinions on failure are correct?
I haven't commented on this topic before (here or elsewhere) but I don't understand your surprise at people being critical. Everyone has a vested interest in keeping the planet usable. We could try lots of things in space, like agriculture or power production. It takes a lot of fuel to push a usable kilogram of stuff into a low orbit (laser propulsion and spin launches aren't quite there yet), so moving operations into orbit has various major downsides. So long as nobody states an upside, yeah, my mind is quite blown about wasting investor money on this. Even when not considering the opportunity cost of that used money (alternative positive uses), it seems like burning the equivalent amount of cash in a bonfire or otherwise disappearing the money would be a lesser evil
It’s simply a stupid idea that indeed will not work, and this little tech demo is mostly a proof of that. It’s awful to many people, especially engineers, to witness incompetence, waste, and inefficiency. Especially when we’re talking about investments of billions of dollars and orbital launches.
It's like watching flat earthers launch yet another experiment to prove the earth is flat. We already know the outcome, including the subsequent press release that has the words "very promising" and "flawed assumptions" in the same sentence. But this "flat earther" has billions to burn and enough clout to keep investors and the media in the carousel for the better part of the next few years.
> but here we are, they are flying them up to space and presumably, will start working soon.
From the article:
> Google will run Gemini models on the TPUs for testing, but they won’t be able to run continuously. The cooling system will only be able to operate in brief spurts of about 15 minutes. After that, the TPUs need to shut down to allow the radiators to catch up.
That's nit-picking. It's one of the first steps towards this goal. Why would any sane engineer put a complete orbital data centre prototype into space without having any data on how most crucial piece of equipment would perform in the target environment?
First they figure out whether they could get away with using unmodified "off-the-shelf" hardware they already have and how to cool it.
By the time they have a working design, it'll already be a small group of such satellites basically being a fully operational orbital data centre, albeit a rather small one. So yeah, I think there's a point to calling this a test for an "orbital data centre", just like Apollo 1-A was a test for a manned Moon mission despite being suborbital and uncrewed.
The physics aren't the problem, though. You CAN cool the processors provided you have large enough radiators, a really good system for the coolant flow, and hardware that's fine operating continuously at around 100C or above.
That's basically an engineering challenge more than anything else. Also keep in mind that one of the reasons the ISS for example requires rather large radiators, is that humans typically don't enjoy temperatures above 40C for prolonged periods of time.
Silicon chips on the other can tolerate much higher operating temperatures just fine and even short spikes around 100C can be acceptable for some hardware.
The real challenge is getting launch cost down and securing the rights to pollute polar orbits and frequency bands. Sure, there's plenty of room up there in orbit, but much of that room is not fit for purpose in the context of orbital data centres. Frequency bands for up- and downlinks are also often ignored in the discussion.
Basically I don't see the current issues with the concept in the required engineering or physics - that's solvable in the near term.
I find it much more difficult to believe that there's a way hundreds of thousands of satellites can share the same orbit (i.e. polar orbit in a quite "narrow" band of distances from the surface) without causing major issues.
Same goes for frequency bands, as it wouldn't be just one US company doing this, but dozens from around the world, each with hundreds or thousands of sats and everyone needs a share of the available communication frequencies.
Then there's the logistics of getting the satellites into orbit in the first place. Not just the launch cost, the logistics! Fuel, NOTAMS, maritime exclusion zones, launch licences, etc. The concept would necessitate increasing current launch rates by at least an order of magnitude and cost aside, the logistics and regulatory frameworks aren't ready for this.
It's a marketing exercise; the physics are not required to make sense for those. It's the size of a fridge, draws a kilowatt, has four TPUs and can only run for 15 minutes at a time. The physics work for _that_; they just don't give you anything useful.
I am curious about the physical layout for moving the highly-concentrated heat in the GPUs out to the diffuse radiation panels required to keep them at operating temperature. Would it need something like a liquid cooling loop coupled with large radiators?
and also curious how it's cheaper to send all the expensive silicon to space and throw it away when its obsolete compared to just racking it in the midwest somewhere?
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 54.5 ms ] threadCurious to see if the experiment changes our understanding of space radiators at a certain scale for non-space exploration purposes.
Lots of technologies start out looking hard and economically infeasible. But if you invest in development, you're able to get a few breakthroughs, and suddenly, it's economically viable.
If they do get things to work out, the benefits seem obvious: 24/7 access to clean energy, not upsetting the people who'd rather not have a datacenter next door (or in the same state), and plenty of space to scale up.
For now, at least, this market doesn’t behave like the one for CPUs which are more fungible and general purpose.
Rather than thinking about the value of a GPU over time, it’s more useful to think about the value of a model (or generation of models) that will run on the GPU.
Sol 6 launched last week. People will build products/agents/systems on Sol 6. Many of those will end up staying on that model for the lifetime of the end product (due to working well enough), which means there will be long-term demand for the model, and that means long-term demand for the GPU set that the model runs on.
For now, at least, models are tuned to a specific GPU and don’t move to the newest hardware very easily.
How does capacity not apply in space? You can’t just boost a gpu into orbit and it’ll start running. It needs to be hooked into power and cooling infrastructure still and that will always be limited by how much infrastructure you have up there.
I'm guessing this is part of the whole idea; to get data before its actually doable, and the cost is worth the early data to help with future development
Orbital data centers are a stupid idea conjured up by Musk when he was taking mescaline or ketamine. Anyone with half a brain knows this doesn't make sense.
Muak is merging all his failed enterprises (Tesla, xAI, Boring Company, Twitter) into to the one that's been relatively succesful, SpaceX, mostly because of Starlink the idea for which he himself didn't even come up with and was initially seen as an afterthought to get some revenue.
Ha, peak HN. Everyone else is idiot.
So why do it? Because datacenter regulations on earth are becoming a referendum by proxy on AI. "Texas has no jurisdiction in low earth orbit!" is the general idea. Critics point out that this is a transparent move to moot the argument over AI, and that it doesn't even work in principle, due to above mentioned physics.
I haven't commented on this topic before (here or elsewhere) but I don't understand your surprise at people being critical. Everyone has a vested interest in keeping the planet usable. We could try lots of things in space, like agriculture or power production. It takes a lot of fuel to push a usable kilogram of stuff into a low orbit (laser propulsion and spin launches aren't quite there yet), so moving operations into orbit has various major downsides. So long as nobody states an upside, yeah, my mind is quite blown about wasting investor money on this. Even when not considering the opportunity cost of that used money (alternative positive uses), it seems like burning the equivalent amount of cash in a bonfire or otherwise disappearing the money would be a lesser evil
From the article:
> Google will run Gemini models on the TPUs for testing, but they won’t be able to run continuously. The cooling system will only be able to operate in brief spurts of about 15 minutes. After that, the TPUs need to shut down to allow the radiators to catch up.
I mean, ah, define 'working'.
First they figure out whether they could get away with using unmodified "off-the-shelf" hardware they already have and how to cool it.
By the time they have a working design, it'll already be a small group of such satellites basically being a fully operational orbital data centre, albeit a rather small one. So yeah, I think there's a point to calling this a test for an "orbital data centre", just like Apollo 1-A was a test for a manned Moon mission despite being suborbital and uncrewed.
They're, ahead, not doing that, though. Per the article, they explicitly will not attempt to provide adequate cooling.
That's basically an engineering challenge more than anything else. Also keep in mind that one of the reasons the ISS for example requires rather large radiators, is that humans typically don't enjoy temperatures above 40C for prolonged periods of time.
Silicon chips on the other can tolerate much higher operating temperatures just fine and even short spikes around 100C can be acceptable for some hardware.
The real challenge is getting launch cost down and securing the rights to pollute polar orbits and frequency bands. Sure, there's plenty of room up there in orbit, but much of that room is not fit for purpose in the context of orbital data centres. Frequency bands for up- and downlinks are also often ignored in the discussion.
Basically I don't see the current issues with the concept in the required engineering or physics - that's solvable in the near term.
I find it much more difficult to believe that there's a way hundreds of thousands of satellites can share the same orbit (i.e. polar orbit in a quite "narrow" band of distances from the surface) without causing major issues.
Same goes for frequency bands, as it wouldn't be just one US company doing this, but dozens from around the world, each with hundreds or thousands of sats and everyone needs a share of the available communication frequencies.
Then there's the logistics of getting the satellites into orbit in the first place. Not just the launch cost, the logistics! Fuel, NOTAMS, maritime exclusion zones, launch licences, etc. The concept would necessitate increasing current launch rates by at least an order of magnitude and cost aside, the logistics and regulatory frameworks aren't ready for this.
and also curious how it's cheaper to send all the expensive silicon to space and throw it away when its obsolete compared to just racking it in the midwest somewhere?