The only place where a space data center makes sense is in Mars orbit to reduce the amount of mass that needs to be landed. Every thing else is a smoke and mirrors game to justify rolling a bunch of failed businesses into SpaceX.
What specifically do you disagree with from the article to say its Smoke and Mirrors? I think their analysis is reasonable and that it will reduce to a launch cost problem.
Saying it is equivalent to launch costs is hand waving. Their "median" scenario would involve Starship working at the lower bound of their operational goal for it.
Even then. If you're building a million satellites, they only need to be about 42 meters long for you to make them into a contiguous ring in LEO. Smaller (22.5m) or fewer (537,000) for the same in a 200 km orbit around Mars.
Do that, and you can quickly bootstrap an orbital ring and make rockets obsolete from surface to orbit of either body.
In the case of Mars, the planet-wide dust storms make
it a good idea to locate your PV off-planet, and an orbital ring is also very convenient for that.
Structually, it barely matters. The physics works even if each element isn't joined contiguously to the next, it's just that if you do you can also use it for power delivery and worry less about elements drifting out of alignment.
Orbital data centers look more viable than we expected going in and the case rests primarily on launch cost. The engineering challenges seem significant but none appear intractable. Commercial off-the-shelf solar, passive radiators, and standard error-correcting codes seem sufficient for a baseline architecture. We expect limited demos and shipments of compute to orbit in the coming years but our best estimate is that orbital data centers are unlikely to represent a meaningful share of compute before 2030. They might scale quickly thereafter however, and are more likely to be bottlenecked by chip production rates rather than by launch cadence. A generally important dynamic is that terrestrial data centers likely face headwinds that worsen as compute scales up while orbital data centers face constraints that relax with scale.
And all those conclusions take is cost to space to reduce 15 times; new cooling tech that isn't used anywhere to work at scale but only in space (if ground datacenters can use it too, their cost decrease); that ops cost line to not do anything useful so it can be just dropped; those 10mm radiation shields to not weight anything, because they didn't enter the costs; and that ground datacenters to use more expensive tech than they use today (just not improving is not enough).
We will have space datacenters some day. But I'm not holding my breath.
Anyone who thinks we’ll have data centres in space before we have a civilisation changing step up in surface to orbit space drives and materials science is an idiot.
How the hell does anyone think a rocket is ever going to compete with a prime mover towing two trailers, or an ocean going vessel.
Yes, it is. There is such a phenomenon as infrared radiation. You feel it on your skin right now. It is hard normally to separate them from other ways you exchange heat with your environment, but in some conditions it is easy. Like when there is a hot object you can feel it to be hot even if you don't touch it or the air heated by the object. Likewise you can feel that a cold object is cold thing without touching it or cold air around it.
These experiments would be hard to run in space, because it is highly polluted by vacuum and it is not a good idea to expose human limbs to vacuum. But artificial sensors could be used for that.
You know what else has 24//7 energy? The bog standard power grid, some solar panels, and some batteries. I can even have redundancy and regular maintenance cycles on the ground.
Scott Manley did a video on this and basically concluded that technologically this is totally possible, but the economics may never work. It would depend on how much free power buys you compared to launch costs etc.
I fail to see the economic case. You will need very large solar arrays and radiation hardened components, both of which make it uneconomical compared to a data center on Earth. This is another of Musk's genius ideas like the tunnels that were supposed to be carrying us under cities by now.
Musk's "genius idea" there was to (pardon the pun) derail high speed rail and other similar investments so he could sell more cars.
What are Hyperloop/Boring actually doing now? It doesn't take that much investment to human-drive a 10-20 Teslas up and down the Vegas Strip in a straight tunnel at normal speeds.
The problem is that experiments into this by Google have concluded that radiation hardening is unnecessary. HBM memory far surpassed their expectations for survival, exceeding 5 years in their simulated proton beam on earth. Localized shielding for consumer equipment is more than enough, especially combined with ECC.
Solar power and power dissipation are similarly solvable. The only bottleneck currently is launch costs which is why it’s expected around 2030 is when these DCs will explode
> Solar power and power dissipation are similarly solvable
So it is not outright stupid, just has a few extra costs.
So again, what's the economical benefit? Because you surely have no power and dissipation problem down on Earth, so why add a whole rocket launch into the equation? Because big fire goes brr?
Because data centers take a long time to get through local regulations. By comparison launching a bunch of satellites into orbit is much simpler and you don’t get local political opposition you have to spend a lot of resources trying to overcome (not to mention secondary cost effects of needing a lot more staff to manage all the diffuse lobbying that needs to happen). Any political opposition to space DCs is going to be more diffuse and disparate since any problems are non local. There’s also that cooling is logistically easier in space and thus cheaper as it’s a small amount of mass vs the huge cooling towers since they’re cooling a rack directly instead of needing to cool the entire DC.
So what’s the economic benefit? As Suncatcher has predicted, the economic cost benefit flips to space DCs at a certain launch price/kg which is expected to be reached commercially by early to mid 2030s (spacex will be ahead because they don’t need profitable launches and can get ahead).
We surely don't expect the same total computation throughput from one data center and a couple of satellites, right?
Like even if a single satellite launch is cheaper than.. building a whole building, I have a really hard time believing that putting that many satellites up would still be cheaper.
And even that hypothetical depends on that we need some very quickly growing need for compute, which somehow can't be managed by.. simply replacing the existing compute hardware every 5 years in data centers, and the relative slow build of new ones?
Space is big. We’re not talking about a couple of satellites eithers. It’s probably many tens of satellites in close proximity. Enough to host a single LLM model for example. Then you put up enough of these micro DCs. There’s simply no need for a single constellation with thousands of racks like a terrestrial warehouse. The only reason you do it that way today is purely because that’s how permitting and construction makes sense on earth, not because there’s some inherent advantage.
The bet that they are making is that, in the near-future, energy on Earth will be such an issue (especially if you want to scale) that DCs on Earth will cost more than components + launch costs
Why would energy be an issue? The Sun is shining, wind is blowing, the ocean has waves, nuclear is nuclear. All of these will just get more efficient in using the same constant resource.
The PV at least can potentially be much less robust than on Earth, since it doesn't have to contend with wind and weather. CdTe thin films, for example, can be just 1 micron thick (the absorption length of solar photons in that material is ~0.1 microns). So potentially the material cost of space PV can be much less than the same peak power PV on Earth.
I'd imagine sometime in the future we will build processing wafers similar to monocrystalline solar panels. Data processed sequentially over a couple dozen feet. AI models hard coded into the silicon itself. The entire data center maybe a milimeter thick sheet.
I wouldn't put it past him to launch 20,000 of them before moving on to the next thing.
Or two. It's a broad range, but with his personality and prior history both are possible before he announces whatever the next pivot is.
Just, not a million. There's better things to do with the capacity to put a million up there, and better places to put a million (last I checked) 120 kW compute racks and associated PV systems.
No we will not. The reason is simple: Space is not in the cloud, it is above. Anything that's not in the cloud is bad.
Silliness aside, has anyone come up with a cooling system that would work well for a friggin data center in space? Or is it still all just a wishful thinking game, ignoring physics?
> Silliness aside, has anyone come up with a cooling system that would work well for a friggin data center in space? Or is it still all just a wishful thinking game, ignoring physics
That's perfectly viable.
However at the temperatures chips operate at, because stuff on the ground is getting convective cooling as well as radiative, a radiator designed for LEO will reject slightly more heat on the ground than it would in orbit.
It is absolutely a wishful thinking game, ignoring physics. It's a bet made by investors who don't know or care about the science, and are looking for a modal outcome of a failed company purchased by SpaceX or by an even dumber company looking to compete with SpaceX.
I recommend reading up on the results of Google’s project suncatcher. IMHO the results have provided a roadmap to space DCs with the only blocker being launch cost which are targeted to become economically viable in 2030s; sooner for spacex because they can lower their margins to zero or even negative for the launch itself.
Whenever I asked someone to dig down into "against the laws of physics" arguments, they turned out to instead rest on a pile of tacit and pessimistic technological assumptions.
Perhaps you could explain in detail why you think the laws of physics have to be violated for space data centers to work.
The plan as I understand it is to pack it tightly with TPUs with liquid cooling out to radiators and flying a tight cluster of these next to each other using high bandwidth laser links. That lets you balance the amount of thermal radiation you need to emit vs the amount of TPUs in a single satellite. Thus it’s not a DC in a single satellite but more like a rack and then a bundle of racks flying beside each other.
Or you know, just have tpus with liquid cooling in huge racks, with optical cables or whatever. We can put a shitton of them into a warehouse sized space, and we have basically infinite energy to power and cool it, with physical connection to the internet for ultra fast speeds!
The problem is that building the physical DCs is a cost problem not just in terms of energy availability (it’s not infinite) but also politics and legal regulations. Ignoring that is why it makes the space idea seem silly but it’s a real one
Well, how does that liquid cooling agent get cooled down? Do we have a way of producing sufficient surface area, to be able to cool it down in space, where cooling is difficult exactly due to not interacting with much matter.
You probably replied to the wrong commenter as they were talking how a warehouse is easier.
To answer your question, what project suncatcher results show is the cooling radiator needed to dissipate the rack is a insignificant fraction of the mass of the satellite rack. It bounds the absolute size of a rack you can launch maybe but that’s why you build a close flying constellation of many many such satellites interlinked by high speed laser links to handle the inter-rack communication.
> and becomes cheaper than any current terrestrial energy source at around $50/kg
Heck for $50/kg I could see it, too. Now with Falcon 9 or Heavy it's on the order of thousands, isn't it? Just need a measly two orders of magnitude improvement and then we can start talking.
Does gauging this based on Falcon 9 launch costs make sense now? SpaceX has already deployed two payloads of satellites using Starship. Falcon 9 is a deprecated system because SpaceX intends to use Starship for future payload missions.
We can't yet know the ultimate cost of Starship payloads. All we have is SpaceX projections of $10-100/kg. Maybe that is realized, maybe not. Given the scale of the LA launch site they're building, they intend to have the launch cadence to deliver lower launch costs than anything achieved with Falcon 9 or any other launch system ever created.
The viability of space DCs seem to depend entirely on the existence of higher latency, lower throughput, single card to single server workloads, which IMO isn't the primary class of workload today (and if one holds the belief that frontier will maintain their dominant position, this will remain rack/row/facility level, which isn't viable for orbital facilities to handle).
If that workload does expand in usage, and the economics of orbital DCs make sense (with high launch costs, zero ability to do maintenance, and weight penalties for shielding and radiators), then surely ocean based data centers (e.g. Panthalassa) make more sense (lower 'launch' costs, high latency on maintenance, no weight penalties), and if those make sense then surely the distributed land based facilities (e.g. Rune Energy) or home based facilities (e.g. Span XFRA) make even more sense (easier maintenance, low/no permitting overhead because they're covered by existing permits, reasonable quality terrestrial fiber internet).
And putting things in the ocean is only marginally less idiotic due primarily to sea water being corrosive, wet, and full of creatures that tend to want to grow all over anything.
Microsoft did attempt ocean racks in a sealed container , and it sounded like the 3 year test ended successfully but was not renewed.
I presume the cost of setup, teardown, lead-time, low power density when scaled up, and lack of convenient access for mid-life repairs made it not worth the trouble
This is the sort of thing that highlights why space is such a dumb place to put a DC.
Everything about storing a DC underwater is easier than it is in space (except corrosion).
It's easier to access, cheaper, easier to cool, easier to get enough power, easier to update.
Heck, doing a second story data-center resolves a ton of issues with today's data-centers (while being a bit more expensive due to additional structural support requirements).
There are so many options for terrestrial DCs to overcome whatever problem space might supposedly solve, and they are all cheaper than the space solution.
how is power easier? solar power in orbit seems like a no-brainer - no losses due to the atmosphere / weather, and with the right orbit you can get sun all the time. Was the ocean DC tide-powered or something? how does that compare?
In space, you have to deploy all the power production you want to consume in the same package that's consuming that power.
On earth, you can build a power plant miles from the DC. And you can use all sorts of different sources of power, tidal, wind, nuclear, solar, fossil fuels. All options. And like the DC, if there's a problem with any of those sources, you can go fix it or replace it with different power sources. If there's a problem with the solar panels in space, your DC is dead.
It looks like ISS can generate 240KW peak from 2500m2 of solar panels, and runs at half of that nominally [0].
A single B200 can consume up to 1200W. A single GB300 system needs 14.5kW. So, you can only have ~15 (incl. satellite's energy needs) GB300 with ISS' solar panels, which is absurd. See [1] for the size of the panels we're talking about.
People dream about Starlink-style close flying systems to aggregate them to a single data center. With these power requirements, it's more like an AI hallucination. If we can build way more efficient chips or run smaller models on modest hardware, etc. We may go there, but needing ISS sized solar panels to run frontier models in space?
Also, don't forget the radiators. You also need those to pump that heat out of these systems.
Spacecraft in LEO deal with corrosion due to metal oxidation from atomic oxygen atoms up there. The rate of this can be greater than on Earth's surface, though I'm not sure how oceans compare.
Yes, but that apparently proves the point of the poster above you.
The moderate improvements in cooling we're not worth the extra complexity.
So it just didn't make sense to do outside of a single media stunt project.
Data centers in space don't even get the cooling benefit.
The whole idea just doesn't survive modest consideration. Data centers aren't particularly dangerous. There's no forcing function to put them away from where people live. The best location for a data center is going to be a decent sized urban center with existing utilities (power and network) and acceptable land costs.
There are nearly forty of them in Atlanta, people walk by them every day with no idea what they are.
Unless you burn them during reentry. When this idea started to be discussed for the first time, somebody ran the numbers, and burning defunct ones during reentry created a massive fallout of hazardous materials, threatening the health of everyone on the planet.
Microsoft can’t catch a break. Their Surface mashup with Nvidia probably is probably dead within a year. Copilot and the gaming empire appear to be falling apart, other than massive Capex being lit on fire what does Microsoft/Nadella have to show for it right now aside from a plan to layoff 60,000 people.
I think if we manufactured most of the infrastructure and maybe the chips or solar panels in space it might actually make sense. Nobody is talking about that though, I guess Elon is saving the we will make the solar panels in space for a down quarter.
How would it make sense? Have you seen how things are manufactured? Why would you want to make something harder and more expensive than it has to be? It's delusional to think that these things will work better in space/on mars than on earth.
Some metallurgy on the Moon might be easier - at least the atmosphere doesn’t want to react with the materials. For other processes, you actually want some of the atmosphere to do exactly that.
We’ll need to develop base industries from scratch for these environments, but, eventually, we’ll get there. The downside is that it’ll take at least multiple decades, if not more than a century.
I would not expect that to happen any sooner than 50 years from now. If a flight to the Moon on a Starship really requires a dozen refuelling flights, then we need an even bigger rocket (because the larger a rocket is, the more efficient it gets). Then we need to develop and build automated and teleoperated lunar factories, maybe ship the electronics from Earth for final assembly on the Moon, establish lunar mining and metalworking to build the structures, motors, actuators, solar panels, radiators, find raw materials and process them into heat exchanger fluids and propellants, and launch the satellites at least to Lunar orbit so they can self propel to their destination orbit where latency is not two seconds.
Even with an intelligence explosion guiding the development of all these technologies, it’d take many decades.
I don't think it's quite as crazy as you make it sound.
Per unit area, the radiators dissipate a similar amount of energy as the solar panels do, so they'll be a similar size. That's doable.
The upside is there's no land and power generation or grid connection issue; you get solar power 24/7 and the latency to earth is just a few ms.
It would also be possible to fly the individual satellites close together so that you can do high bandwidth optical links between them, i.e. you're not limited to single rack workloads.
A single GB200 rack costs about $3M, transporting its 1.4 tons on a Falcon 9 would cost a similar amount, around $4-5M.
That's got to be too expensive for now, but it's also not in a range that's totally off.
The idea is essentially a bet on land and power continuing to be a big issue and launch costs getting a lot cheaper, which they very well might with Starship.
Finding land/power/space to do a _single_ rack is not hard as ~every office building in America has 200kW of extra power and HVAC water at ~25C. Plus it only costs $4-5k to stick that $5M rack in the back of a truck to drive it there. No permits, easy maintenance, stable network connectivity.
Why use a satellite to do what your IT closet can already do?
Why are you guys rehashing the exact calculations that were made in the article? The article is all about these calculations, and they give ranges of values for each cost to see the the possible price points for everything in order to make it worthwhile.
They take all of the bits you guys are talking about into account in the article. You might disagree with some of the numbers, I guess, but that doesn't seem to be what you guys are talking about.
I know you probably weren't meaning to solve a business model here, but there are differences between the space-borne rack and the earthbound rack that will require cost consideration. Likewise the space-bound system will have no maintenance and will thus either require planning to manufacture for higher reliability or plan for greater risk of failure in MTTR/replacement cost modeling.
Whomever decides to fund the venture will necessarily ask investors/CFO to rationalize the expected return.
In our modern hurry up, returns only pencil out in the very far future and yet investors seem to care little.
I am not certain that reflects good capitalist values or discipline.
I think the kinds of workloads that will be profitable to run in space are not complex workloads, but rather ones that benefit from being outside of any country. Power (control authority) that is running on space infrastructure is literally above the law. It doesn't take a whole lot of compute to do a lot of things.
The uplinks that talk to the satellite are in a country. The company that owns the uplinks and the satellite is in a country. The people that work for that company live on the ground and in a country. Having a GPU in space won't let anyone operate "above" the law.
Even if their aren't financially viable, I think they're attractive because companies want to keep certain kinds of data/processing on everyone/everything someplace where there's a lower chance of government regulation (gdpr/etc).
If this is the case, I wouldn't be surprised to see them support these kinds of regulations because it would enhance their moat (now earth orbit in addition to large capex for equipment and a sufficiently large user base).
It seems to be in certain cases. For example Meta is subject to GDPR because they have EU headquarters, and were subject to fines because they transferred EU data to US servers.
If they have headquarters outside the EU, and only use data they've already acquired/processed to make money off of EU consumers from outside the EU, GDPR shouldn't be an issue for them in the same way.
And GDPR makes it harder for their competitors to catch up because it's harder for those competitors to get data.
Probably, but not in the same way. I'm guessing they wouldn't have been fined for external data transfers if their servers were located outside the EU.
It could be that the EU would block them if they wanted to host fb/etc... including ads, and didn't have a presence in the EU, but I'm not sure if that's the case.
In that case, international water is far easier. There already are server farms on old oil rigs.
But, as these things go, regulation isn't that much about where you put the computers, but about where you register your company, and where your customers are living.
It's easier, but it's riskier too. Someone can come along a take your stuff a lot easier at sea than they can in orbit. And weather is always tricky, although launches aren't easy either.
In terms of regulation, it depends on the specifics. Sometimes it depends on where the customer lives, but even if it does, when a platform has no business operations in a region and there aren't international treaties between the consumer country and where they're operating from to resolve that sort of thing, the most the regulating country can do is block them.
The article makes several big assumptions that are questionable (experimental cooling can scale, permit issues on land will only become worse, etc). But more importantly, their analysis of the risks of placing a data center in orbit is completely off. They mention that it costs tens of millions to launch a missile to destroy a satellite, and it might be cheaper to simply replace it (based on launch costs). But one strike can hit many targets, those targets may contain hardware costing multiple times the value of their launch, and you will be out of compute while you scramble to launch a replacement. We can also assume that placing big fat valuable targets in space would have many actors wondering how to make it cheaper to destroy them.
For those reasons alone, and because compute will become more and more strategic for defense, I find it very hard to believe that data centers in space will represent even 5% of all compute in the next 10 years. I think a higher proportion will rather be underground or in bunkers than in space.
I don‘t think both sides are equal though. The vibes on one side is the default assumption that this is a dumb idea and is never going to work. The vibes on the other side goes against traditional wisdom but it will somehow work anyway.
Vibing with the default assumption is cheap, and it should be cheap. While we have no reason to believe otherwise there is no reason to go looking for a lot of evidence for why we are right. Everybody believes so, so why bother convincing us right? Vibes are enough until proven otherwise.
Vibing against the default assumption is expensive, and it should be expensive. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that. Your job is to prove that you are right, that the traditional wisdom is wrong, and that everybody has to change their mind. Vibing in this direction is not nearly enough. In fact, the vibes in this direction are worth nothing.
In space solar energy is available all the time. That is not the case in those locations, and the storage needs to get around that are the worst on Earth.
You don't have to pack your energy generator into the same package where your compute would go, for laughably little energy. You can have a single cable go between a huge power plant and the data center.
Ever heard of a nuclear submarine? Is it also plugged in?
And obviously you wouldn't bring the energy from a different continent. You think the wind is not blowing at these places? My point was that you have all the space you need, don't have to create a compact thing for everything.
I want you to consider the difficulty of building anything at those places. It's going to cost at least as much to transport material there as it does to put stuff into space with a mature Starship-like launcher.
Nuclear submarine reactors are not sources of cheap power. Such power plants aren't even economical for most naval vessels vs. burning petroleum-derived fuels.
Isn’t “space grade” a result of high space launch costs? If it becomes cheap enough to launch hardware into space, it doesn’t need to last as long to meet ROI.
I would say no. The high launch cost argument does apply, but the more important factor is that space is just a much harsher environment in which to do computation. It's not just about mean time to failure, it's about avoiding errors during the working life.
As a Linux user, I can already build such a system quite trivially by installing Debian on a Raspberry Pi, attaching it to a weather balloon, and setting up a cron job to maintain orbit. The cooling is handled by opening a window. From Windows or Mac, the balloon could be accessed through built-in software.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to build a nuclear plant to power data centers than to launch the data centers into space? Nuclear is expensive, but rockets, orbital infrastructure, and giant cooling radiators aren't exactly budget options.
Underlying this seems to be the assumption that those pesky governments, pushed around by public opinion, will keep on blocking or delaying terrestrial data centres, but space-based ones will be fine.
The idea that launch rates could increase to the rates required to launch gigawatts of computing into space, without attracting a huge backlash, is fantasy. And such a backlash would be entirely justified - the only reason why the environmental effects of space launch aren't a focus of environmentalists is because there aren't many of them.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 5.0 ms ] threadDo that, and you can quickly bootstrap an orbital ring and make rockets obsolete from surface to orbit of either body.
In the case of Mars, the planet-wide dust storms make it a good idea to locate your PV off-planet, and an orbital ring is also very convenient for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring
The impulse to discredit someone's "art" because of their politics has always stuck me as incredibly juvenile.
It's as if people can't imagine competence - even in some narrow way - in someone who doesn't share all their exact beliefs.
It seems especially silly because literally every great man and woman of history shares only a tiny fraction of our modern beliefs.
Sorry. Not sorry.
Conclusions
Orbital data centers look more viable than we expected going in and the case rests primarily on launch cost. The engineering challenges seem significant but none appear intractable. Commercial off-the-shelf solar, passive radiators, and standard error-correcting codes seem sufficient for a baseline architecture. We expect limited demos and shipments of compute to orbit in the coming years but our best estimate is that orbital data centers are unlikely to represent a meaningful share of compute before 2030. They might scale quickly thereafter however, and are more likely to be bottlenecked by chip production rates rather than by launch cadence. A generally important dynamic is that terrestrial data centers likely face headwinds that worsen as compute scales up while orbital data centers face constraints that relax with scale.
We will have space datacenters some day. But I'm not holding my breath.
Anyone who thinks we’ll have data centres in space before we have a civilisation changing step up in surface to orbit space drives and materials science is an idiot.
How the hell does anyone think a rocket is ever going to compete with a prime mover towing two trailers, or an ocean going vessel.
We’re not exactly short of land.
And no, space is not cold.
Yes, it is. There is such a phenomenon as infrared radiation. You feel it on your skin right now. It is hard normally to separate them from other ways you exchange heat with your environment, but in some conditions it is easy. Like when there is a hot object you can feel it to be hot even if you don't touch it or the air heated by the object. Likewise you can feel that a cold object is cold thing without touching it or cold air around it.
These experiments would be hard to run in space, because it is highly polluted by vacuum and it is not a good idea to expose human limbs to vacuum. But artificial sensors could be used for that.
Starcloud-1 is already in orbit, and many other plans by them and other firms are already well into development.
And Lonestar has a backup server on the moon. Seriously.
What are Hyperloop/Boring actually doing now? It doesn't take that much investment to human-drive a 10-20 Teslas up and down the Vegas Strip in a straight tunnel at normal speeds.
Solar power and power dissipation are similarly solvable. The only bottleneck currently is launch costs which is why it’s expected around 2030 is when these DCs will explode
So it is not outright stupid, just has a few extra costs.
So again, what's the economical benefit? Because you surely have no power and dissipation problem down on Earth, so why add a whole rocket launch into the equation? Because big fire goes brr?
So what’s the economic benefit? As Suncatcher has predicted, the economic cost benefit flips to space DCs at a certain launch price/kg which is expected to be reached commercially by early to mid 2030s (spacex will be ahead because they don’t need profitable launches and can get ahead).
Like even if a single satellite launch is cheaper than.. building a whole building, I have a really hard time believing that putting that many satellites up would still be cheaper.
And even that hypothetical depends on that we need some very quickly growing need for compute, which somehow can't be managed by.. simply replacing the existing compute hardware every 5 years in data centers, and the relative slow build of new ones?
I mean, Elon will probably shoot some GPUs up there and call it a success, but I'm not sure that should could at "data centers in space."
Or two. It's a broad range, but with his personality and prior history both are possible before he announces whatever the next pivot is.
Just, not a million. There's better things to do with the capacity to put a million up there, and better places to put a million (last I checked) 120 kW compute racks and associated PV systems.
Silliness aside, has anyone come up with a cooling system that would work well for a friggin data center in space? Or is it still all just a wishful thinking game, ignoring physics?
That's perfectly viable.
However at the temperatures chips operate at, because stuff on the ground is getting convective cooling as well as radiative, a radiator designed for LEO will reject slightly more heat on the ground than it would in orbit.
Perhaps you could explain in detail why you think the laws of physics have to be violated for space data centers to work.
(Sorry, the snark is not directed at you)
To answer your question, what project suncatcher results show is the cooling radiator needed to dissipate the rack is a insignificant fraction of the mass of the satellite rack. It bounds the absolute size of a rack you can launch maybe but that’s why you build a close flying constellation of many many such satellites interlinked by high speed laser links to handle the inter-rack communication.
Heck for $50/kg I could see it, too. Now with Falcon 9 or Heavy it's on the order of thousands, isn't it? Just need a measly two orders of magnitude improvement and then we can start talking.
We can't yet know the ultimate cost of Starship payloads. All we have is SpaceX projections of $10-100/kg. Maybe that is realized, maybe not. Given the scale of the LA launch site they're building, they intend to have the launch cadence to deliver lower launch costs than anything achieved with Falcon 9 or any other launch system ever created.
If that workload does expand in usage, and the economics of orbital DCs make sense (with high launch costs, zero ability to do maintenance, and weight penalties for shielding and radiators), then surely ocean based data centers (e.g. Panthalassa) make more sense (lower 'launch' costs, high latency on maintenance, no weight penalties), and if those make sense then surely the distributed land based facilities (e.g. Rune Energy) or home based facilities (e.g. Span XFRA) make even more sense (easier maintenance, low/no permitting overhead because they're covered by existing permits, reasonable quality terrestrial fiber internet).
And putting things in the ocean is only marginally less idiotic due primarily to sea water being corrosive, wet, and full of creatures that tend to want to grow all over anything.
I presume the cost of setup, teardown, lead-time, low power density when scaled up, and lack of convenient access for mid-life repairs made it not worth the trouble
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/natick/
Everything about storing a DC underwater is easier than it is in space (except corrosion).
It's easier to access, cheaper, easier to cool, easier to get enough power, easier to update.
Heck, doing a second story data-center resolves a ton of issues with today's data-centers (while being a bit more expensive due to additional structural support requirements).
There are so many options for terrestrial DCs to overcome whatever problem space might supposedly solve, and they are all cheaper than the space solution.
On earth, you can build a power plant miles from the DC. And you can use all sorts of different sources of power, tidal, wind, nuclear, solar, fossil fuels. All options. And like the DC, if there's a problem with any of those sources, you can go fix it or replace it with different power sources. If there's a problem with the solar panels in space, your DC is dead.
That's both easier and a lot more flexible.
A single B200 can consume up to 1200W. A single GB300 system needs 14.5kW. So, you can only have ~15 (incl. satellite's energy needs) GB300 with ISS' solar panels, which is absurd. See [1] for the size of the panels we're talking about.
People dream about Starlink-style close flying systems to aggregate them to a single data center. With these power requirements, it's more like an AI hallucination. If we can build way more efficient chips or run smaller models on modest hardware, etc. We may go there, but needing ISS sized solar panels to run frontier models in space?
Also, don't forget the radiators. You also need those to pump that heat out of these systems.
The outlook doesn't look good at this point.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panels_on_spacecraft#Spa...
[1]: https://www.sgmk.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/iss.png
Spacecraft in LEO deal with corrosion due to metal oxidation from atomic oxygen atoms up there. The rate of this can be greater than on Earth's surface, though I'm not sure how oceans compare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrosion_in_space
The moderate improvements in cooling we're not worth the extra complexity.
So it just didn't make sense to do outside of a single media stunt project.
Data centers in space don't even get the cooling benefit.
The whole idea just doesn't survive modest consideration. Data centers aren't particularly dangerous. There's no forcing function to put them away from where people live. The best location for a data center is going to be a decent sized urban center with existing utilities (power and network) and acceptable land costs.
There are nearly forty of them in Atlanta, people walk by them every day with no idea what they are.
Unless you burn them during reentry. When this idea started to be discussed for the first time, somebody ran the numbers, and burning defunct ones during reentry created a massive fallout of hazardous materials, threatening the health of everyone on the planet.
We’ll need to develop base industries from scratch for these environments, but, eventually, we’ll get there. The downside is that it’ll take at least multiple decades, if not more than a century.
Long term any colonies on the moon or mars will have to manufacture at least fuel.
Even with an intelligence explosion guiding the development of all these technologies, it’d take many decades.
That's an automatic off switch.
A non-trivial number still think that the hard part of colonizing Mars is the rocket to get there. What can you do?
Per unit area, the radiators dissipate a similar amount of energy as the solar panels do, so they'll be a similar size. That's doable.
The upside is there's no land and power generation or grid connection issue; you get solar power 24/7 and the latency to earth is just a few ms.
It would also be possible to fly the individual satellites close together so that you can do high bandwidth optical links between them, i.e. you're not limited to single rack workloads.
A single GB200 rack costs about $3M, transporting its 1.4 tons on a Falcon 9 would cost a similar amount, around $4-5M.
That's got to be too expensive for now, but it's also not in a range that's totally off.
The idea is essentially a bet on land and power continuing to be a big issue and launch costs getting a lot cheaper, which they very well might with Starship.
Not at the same time. To have few-ms latency you need to be in/below LEO, but then earth blocks the sun half the time.
Why use a satellite to do what your IT closet can already do?
A normal satellite runs something similar to 1U worth of computer and costs roughly what you quoted in total...
They take all of the bits you guys are talking about into account in the article. You might disagree with some of the numbers, I guess, but that doesn't seem to be what you guys are talking about.
Orbital space is becoming increasingly congested and hazardous. I think this is actually one of the worst arguments in support of space data centers.
Whomever decides to fund the venture will necessarily ask investors/CFO to rationalize the expected return.
In our modern hurry up, returns only pencil out in the very far future and yet investors seem to care little.
I am not certain that reflects good capitalist values or discipline.
If this is the case, I wouldn't be surprised to see them support these kinds of regulations because it would enhance their moat (now earth orbit in addition to large capex for equipment and a sufficiently large user base).
If they have headquarters outside the EU, and only use data they've already acquired/processed to make money off of EU consumers from outside the EU, GDPR shouldn't be an issue for them in the same way.
And GDPR makes it harder for their competitors to catch up because it's harder for those competitors to get data.
It could be that the EU would block them if they wanted to host fb/etc... including ads, and didn't have a presence in the EU, but I'm not sure if that's the case.
Maybe the government can't easily access your satellite, but you can, and the government has their $5 wrenches.
Where you put something is completely irrelevant.
But, as these things go, regulation isn't that much about where you put the computers, but about where you register your company, and where your customers are living.
In terms of regulation, it depends on the specifics. Sometimes it depends on where the customer lives, but even if it does, when a platform has no business operations in a region and there aren't international treaties between the consumer country and where they're operating from to resolve that sort of thing, the most the regulating country can do is block them.
For those reasons alone, and because compute will become more and more strategic for defense, I find it very hard to believe that data centers in space will represent even 5% of all compute in the next 10 years. I think a higher proportion will rather be underground or in bunkers than in space.
space debris will ruin the rest.
Yup. See True Anomaly, among others.
Vibing with the default assumption is cheap, and it should be cheap. While we have no reason to believe otherwise there is no reason to go looking for a lot of evidence for why we are right. Everybody believes so, so why bother convincing us right? Vibes are enough until proven otherwise.
Vibing against the default assumption is expensive, and it should be expensive. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that. Your job is to prove that you are right, that the traditional wisdom is wrong, and that everybody has to change their mind. Vibing in this direction is not nearly enough. In fact, the vibes in this direction are worth nothing.
You don't have to pack your energy generator into the same package where your compute would go, for laughably little energy. You can have a single cable go between a huge power plant and the data center.
Also... nuclear? Please don't be silly.
And obviously you wouldn't bring the energy from a different continent. You think the wind is not blowing at these places? My point was that you have all the space you need, don't have to create a compact thing for everything.
Nuclear submarine reactors are not sources of cheap power. Such power plants aren't even economical for most naval vessels vs. burning petroleum-derived fuels.
Also I wonder how long the ODC needs to operate to offset the energy spend on getting it in orbit.
As a Linux user, I can already build such a system quite trivially by installing Debian on a Raspberry Pi, attaching it to a weather balloon, and setting up a cron job to maintain orbit. The cooling is handled by opening a window. From Windows or Mac, the balloon could be accessed through built-in software.
The catches:
o Shielding from the sun's light and radiant heat.
o And efficiently radiating the system heat into space (since there is no air to convect or conduct the heat away).
vs Space:
* Can drive a truck out there
* No limit on weight or dimensions (within reason)
* No giant explodey thing transporting it to into where it needs to be
* No constant falling towards the earth that needs to be averted with thrusters
* If building in the middle of nowhere there is also lots of space for solar panels
* Heat can be rejected into the atmosphere/earth/nearby bodies of water etc instead of radiation into the vacuum of space
* De-comissioning it doesn't also involve slamming a DC worth of mass into the atmosphere and burning up otherwise recyclable materials.
* You don't look like a doofus for doing bad math.
Solar & wind can’t power industry.
The idea that launch rates could increase to the rates required to launch gigawatts of computing into space, without attracting a huge backlash, is fantasy. And such a backlash would be entirely justified - the only reason why the environmental effects of space launch aren't a focus of environmentalists is because there aren't many of them.