People aren't "Republicans" or "Democrats" or whatever. They're people. Of course "Republican support" collapses in communities once you start asking people what they want.
You would wish but it's way too prevalent to call oneself "Republican" or "Democrat" and promise lifetime loyalty. Take almost anything they are mad about when the "other" side does it and ask how they'd feel if "their" side did it.
I almost said gigawatts, but that's not what has to happen. That's thousands of acres of solar panels (terrestrially, anyway). You just aren't getting that many panels on a single orbiting structure. Unless the satellites are powered by nuclear fuel or we come up with something very new and different, there won't be gigawatt space data centers.
If space doesn't work or is deemed too expensive put them right next to the house where the CEO of the company and his family live. Same with nuclear plants, rocket launch sites and chemical plants.
While that solution is, er, not strictly impossible, it still falls into the subcategory of "utterly insane" when you look at real watts and tons and dollars and engineering problems.
I was never a serious proposal, it's some zillionaire fantasizing about having their own Neuromancer-style space-station where their word is law and their dynasty assured by a pet superintelligence.
There is obvious strategic value in bringing some compute into orbit, since realistically such a DC can only be affected by a handful of potential actors. But putting anything more into orbit than a small strategic backup simply makes no sense.
If the issue was "leaving more room and resources for humans and wildlife", it would be much cheaper and easier to put DCs into the ocean. Yes, it's a hostile environment for such hardware, but it would still be much cheaper to handle all the downsides for the same amount of compute - including maintenance, which is currently economically impossible for DCs in orbit.
Usually with these things people pursue a quasi impossible vision that ends up generating useful technological advances along the way. The funding will come from an ultra high risk R&D grade allocation and there will be someone in the supply chain that will benefit regardless of the final outcome. If you look at it from that angle then it is less surprising people around the planet will give it a go. Plus the mockup pictures look cool so free marketing and shocking headlines.
The answer to your and essentially every other comment in this thread is that you simply don't have much choice where to place datacenters.
1) You must have access to the core of the power grid, or a local very large power plant (that can't be near the end of its life), because elsewhere you can't get megawatts of power, never mind gigawatts
2) You need access to year-round flowing water (mostly because of regulations, or without regulations it would be possible to deal with the problem without access to a river)
3) You must have friendly government, banks, ... with realistic promises of staying stable for decades (because of the investment required) (this includes stable interest rates, and yes, despite Trump's best efforts, US is still on the top of the list here)
4) unless you're a hyperscaler that can pay for burying hundreds of miles of fiber, you need to be near crossing points of long-distance fiber links.
5) You must be within 10-50 milliseconds of what you're going to use them for (which, granted, is not much of a restriction in Europe, but it does mostly exclude places like, say, Africa, Australia or South America)
This means that even inside the US, the places where you can build a datacenter are small dots across the map, and there's only several hundred of them, not thousands. The only imho realistic way to make these things be located elsewhere would be to revisit the water regulations a year ago, because it's one of those things that doesn't really make sense anymore.
Such structures would have better latency due to locality, they wouldn't be subject to transmission interference from weather, they'd be far more accessible for replacements/upgrades, and being underground naturally aids in cooling and noise suppression.
While it would be resource intensive to dig out the underground structure, I'd be surprised if it even came close to the resource expenditure required to launch all your computer hardware into stable orbit, not even accounting for the fact that the former is a one-time, up-front cost, while the latter would have to be re-done every time you replace hardware.
Assuming they can solve the cooling problem, there are still major problems with space data center at the scale proponents talk about.
First, getting them up there.
Second, disposal of them when they reach end of life, which is about 5 years.
The difficulty with getting them up there is we currently don't have orbital rockets that don't cause tremendous damage to the upper stratosphere. It has been tolerable so far because we've only done about 7500 orbital launches over the history of spaceflight.
The more extreme plans, like Musk's for a million data centers in space, would require around 10000 launches to get them deployed and then as they age 2000 launches a year to replace old ones.
There is active research and development on rocket fuels that won't cause massive damage, so this problem may be surmountable.
Reentry at end of life is also a concern. As they burn up they deposit things in the upper stratosphere that we really don't want there. As with launches that's not been a problem yet because over the entire history of spaceflight there have only been about 10k satellites and rocket bodies that have reentered, plus about 25k small things like debris.
That would be around 200k per year under the million data center in space plan. I don't know if it is possible to build them so they don't cause problems on reentry.
Probably a better approach for now is to build them in places where large power generation projects are being built. Those projects are already adding new power transmission capacity to get the power to cities, and it should be fairly efficient to at the same time add massive fiber internet capacity along the same right of way used for the transmission lines.
Find this quite funny overall. In the end Loudoun and Santa Clara get cheap power and lower property taxes than otherwise because they host so many datacenters. It’s pretty good that local policy leads to such good outcomes for people. Huge fan of this structure.
The policy-outcome feedback loop should be tight. People rapidly adapt when that happens.
Fortunately site selection is still possible and construction teams are still well occupied. America’s fortunate to enter a period with such clean industry. Dropping the ball here would have been so foolish.
Well, at the minimum "Santa Clara gets cheap power because they host so many data centers" reverses the causality. SVP was already cheaper than PG&E before data centers existed at all, and the decent data center buildout hasn't pushed prices _down_.
DCs set up there because power was cheap, train coverage is good (useful for construction), fiber is everywhere, and of course lobbyists and politicians have their hands out all over NoVa
Depends on the datacenter. If SpaceX etc weren't intent on cutting corners with illegal natural gas generators and trying to trick locals there wouldn't be any push back. Its not like we started building these things in the last couple of years. I've been to plenty of data centers that no one even knew were data centers because they weren't the size of Manhattan and spewing out tons of noise pollution.
Data centers are only going up near populations because the DCs want the community to pay for all the infrastructure upgrades and higher rates.
If the DCs had to go it alone, wait who are we kidding? They never even thought of that path, it's all about how to push the costs on to locals. They want all the freebies they can get.
The current Republican President and his administration are presenting opposition of data centers as a hoax perpetrated by political enemies and/or China to cripple America’s ability to compete in AI. It’s important to know that his own voters disagree with that.
The article seems to be confusing Republicans with people in GOP counties. Republicans are politicians, and just like Democrats, they're only in it for the special interest groups that bribe them, while being completely out of touch with their constituents.
43 comments
[ 8.6 ms ] story [ 74.8 ms ] threadYou would wish but it's way too prevalent to call oneself "Republican" or "Democrat" and promise lifetime loyalty. Take almost anything they are mad about when the "other" side does it and ask how they'd feel if "their" side did it.
I was never a serious proposal, it's some zillionaire fantasizing about having their own Neuromancer-style space-station where their word is law and their dynasty assured by a pet superintelligence.
If the issue was "leaving more room and resources for humans and wildlife", it would be much cheaper and easier to put DCs into the ocean. Yes, it's a hostile environment for such hardware, but it would still be much cheaper to handle all the downsides for the same amount of compute - including maintenance, which is currently economically impossible for DCs in orbit.
1) You must have access to the core of the power grid, or a local very large power plant (that can't be near the end of its life), because elsewhere you can't get megawatts of power, never mind gigawatts
2) You need access to year-round flowing water (mostly because of regulations, or without regulations it would be possible to deal with the problem without access to a river)
3) You must have friendly government, banks, ... with realistic promises of staying stable for decades (because of the investment required) (this includes stable interest rates, and yes, despite Trump's best efforts, US is still on the top of the list here)
4) unless you're a hyperscaler that can pay for burying hundreds of miles of fiber, you need to be near crossing points of long-distance fiber links.
5) You must be within 10-50 milliseconds of what you're going to use them for (which, granted, is not much of a restriction in Europe, but it does mostly exclude places like, say, Africa, Australia or South America)
This means that even inside the US, the places where you can build a datacenter are small dots across the map, and there's only several hundred of them, not thousands. The only imho realistic way to make these things be located elsewhere would be to revisit the water regulations a year ago, because it's one of those things that doesn't really make sense anymore.
https://x02.me/i/pKYOyM.jpeg
one of the biggest threats to AI accelerationism longterm is the public rioting or foreign governments launching attacks against data centers
the plebians won't be able to burn the data centers if you put them in space though.
This is an idea that is getting a lot of airtime but not sure if anyone practical minded thinks it is viable in the next 15 years.
Such structures would have better latency due to locality, they wouldn't be subject to transmission interference from weather, they'd be far more accessible for replacements/upgrades, and being underground naturally aids in cooling and noise suppression.
While it would be resource intensive to dig out the underground structure, I'd be surprised if it even came close to the resource expenditure required to launch all your computer hardware into stable orbit, not even accounting for the fact that the former is a one-time, up-front cost, while the latter would have to be re-done every time you replace hardware.
First, getting them up there.
Second, disposal of them when they reach end of life, which is about 5 years.
The difficulty with getting them up there is we currently don't have orbital rockets that don't cause tremendous damage to the upper stratosphere. It has been tolerable so far because we've only done about 7500 orbital launches over the history of spaceflight.
The more extreme plans, like Musk's for a million data centers in space, would require around 10000 launches to get them deployed and then as they age 2000 launches a year to replace old ones.
There is active research and development on rocket fuels that won't cause massive damage, so this problem may be surmountable.
Reentry at end of life is also a concern. As they burn up they deposit things in the upper stratosphere that we really don't want there. As with launches that's not been a problem yet because over the entire history of spaceflight there have only been about 10k satellites and rocket bodies that have reentered, plus about 25k small things like debris.
That would be around 200k per year under the million data center in space plan. I don't know if it is possible to build them so they don't cause problems on reentry.
Probably a better approach for now is to build them in places where large power generation projects are being built. Those projects are already adding new power transmission capacity to get the power to cities, and it should be fairly efficient to at the same time add massive fiber internet capacity along the same right of way used for the transmission lines.
The policy-outcome feedback loop should be tight. People rapidly adapt when that happens.
Fortunately site selection is still possible and construction teams are still well occupied. America’s fortunate to enter a period with such clean industry. Dropping the ball here would have been so foolish.
DCs set up there because power was cheap, train coverage is good (useful for construction), fiber is everywhere, and of course lobbyists and politicians have their hands out all over NoVa
https://pressaudit.org/blog/datacenters
If the DCs had to go it alone, wait who are we kidding? They never even thought of that path, it's all about how to push the costs on to locals. They want all the freebies they can get.
They bring nothing to the table
This is more indicative of the general NIMBY effect.