Wouldn’t it be cheaper to put it underground?
Also couldn’t power it with the sun. Which is infinite and free power
still have to deal with space debris, and the radiation damaging/wearing down the equipement overtime.
In either case the installation cost and infrastructure costs are excessive and the I/o is probably limited
Considering the ludicrous price to put each pound of equipment into orbit, I’d like to invite them to send as much hardware as they can in to (high) geostationary orbit so they can find out how well a vacuum does NOT promote radiating heat
Edit: also forgot about solar radiation flipping bits. I love the idea of them having to reboot the machine (if they even can) remotely once ever 15 minutes
Whatever happened to resource efficiency, being able to do more for less energy? This whole thing is super unsustainable.
Making reusable rockets is impossible and stupid. Electric cars are stupid and wont work. Satellite internet is too expensive and stupid. So far Elmo is batting 3 for 3 and I am going to bet he can make it work. Unlike the CyberTruck
More nuanced (and without using the word “stupid”)
- Making reusable rockets is very difficult. It was high risk, high reward.
- Electric cars were always the climate change solution IF the battery gets good enough. And it got good enough. I hate my country’s car industry (I’m from Germany) for not getting their asses up.
- Satellite internet is in fact too expensive for average customers. I think, no on has ever declared it as bad for people in regions without existing internet intrastructure. The question is how profitable it is, but it’s not publicly traded, so we will probably not get the numbers.
For sure, Elmo can somehow make profit out of it, e.g. by selling the space cloud usage as “can’t be controlled by an government on earth” for a high price. But when we concentrate on the facts: It can’t be more efficient than Azure or AWS on earth, at least not for the next decades.
The Russians spat at his feet when he asked to buy their rocket engines, lots of naysayers. I have and love my starlink.
none of these things “have worked” they just represent a privately subsidized shift in infrastructure and society. there is no such thing as progress, you progressive
gleaming eyes wide open
I am biased because I have starklink and love it. It works…but before Elon worked on his vision for re usable rockets it was a dream. He changed the world.
Just tell Elmo to add bigger CPU and GPU fans. That’ll work.
Well its a great ideal if you happen to be a company with a space program, sounds like a very lucrative venture.
The thing that people miss in this is that the feature they’re seeking by putting servers in space is only to have servers outside of any jurisdiction, with the advantages that it might bring
This is 1 million% what’s at play here. Tech bros HATE that they have to deal with stupid laws, and putting a server outside of the jurisdiction of literally every country is a dream. A giant server ship has to dock, it needs fuel…not so with something in orbit (in Elon fantasy land anyway)
Imagine spending 10 years to build a server in space to avoid some law and next month government changes the law
Whatever company owns it will be responsible for it. That company will answer to whoever it needs to here on earth.
you think us sub-millionaires have any power in government, huh?
Now that is actually smart
Ridiculous, you can’t have cloud computing in space, there’s no atmosphere!
cause of ping?
There’s nowhere to dump heat! Modern data centers rely on heat exchange systems that move excess waste energy into the air or earth. The servers will be thermally throttled to a crawl.
water cooling?
Sure you can have fancy liquid cooling to move heat away from the processors, but you still need something to move the heat into. You can radiate it into space, but not quickly enough to do useful work 24/7.
oh i get it
I don’t think the point is to really build datacenters in space. The point is to convince investors that it can be done in a profitable manner so some people can create a fake businesses out of it and siphon money off the system. Much like the same as trying to convince investors that LLM + more money = AGI
I also wonder if this is an entire red herring. There are increasing reasons for more compute in space, such as to pre-filter sensor data.
Is it to naive/optimistic to think no one is actually looking for a space datacenter to compute terrestrial loads, but they recognize the need for processing space loads?
See now you all are thinking.
The rich wouldn’t tell us this shit if it wasn’t going to be used as some spin/distraction whatever it is.
Mr Musk has to justify that 1.75t valuation somehow
I love how his rationale is that manufacturers of natural gas generator parts are backordered o 2030, so instead of… I don’t know, spinning up more natural gas hardware or terrestial power generation, the easiest solution is to go from 11 attempts/0 successful launches of a space platform to tens of thousands of launches a year carrying unprecedented mass of bullshit into orbit…
Don’t data-centers require massive cooling?
Yes, and it’s easier to cool things on earth. In space, there’s no air to help you cool thinks off, you can only reject heat through radiation. Most spacecraft are carefully designed to reflect heat/light on surfaces facing the sun and radiate heat into empty space from surfaces that are shaded.
In space there’s no epa
What if you build it on an asteroid or moon or planet. Uranus is ~-225⁰C, right?
Yes I’d like to build data centres on Uranus one of the most distant planets in our solar system, and also one without a solid surface but who’s counting.
It would need to have an atmosphere, so asteroids and most (all? Idk not an astronomer) moons are out.
Mars might be feasible at some point in the far future, but there’s still the lag problem of 3-20 minutes depending on time of year, so not very useful for anything user facing.
most moons
Pretty much every moon but Titan. Titan, however, would be excellent for heat dissipation. Long before generative AI was even a thing, scientists have speculated that Titan would be the perfect place for datacenters because low-temperature computation is so much more efficient.
Of course, building a datacenter on Titan would be a several-hundred-trillion dollar endeavor, so… good luck bootstrapping your way into that industry.
I heard they are investing into moonshot projects.
None of the moons in our solar system have atmospheres. Earths moon is too small to hold on to an atmosphere, and the Galilean moons of Jupiter are too cold for an atmosphere, the gases just freeze.
The best place would be either a space station in low earth orbit or of the L4 or L5 point. The data issue would be the problem though I suppose you could just use the data centres for training but not for active processing but then you would need to build data centres on earth for that.
Given that you’re going to build the earth data centres anyway you might as well do all of the processing on earth at the same time.
None of the moons in our solar system have atmospheres.
Except for Titan. Titan has a lot of atmosphere.
Yes, but the two-and-a-half hour lag each way would be a killer.
My understanding is that these “datacenters” would be used exclusively for model training, where latency doesn’t matter.
It is still an outrageously stupid idea for a zillion other engineering reasons, though.
There’s also the issue that around once a year the two planets will be on opposite sides of the sun. Not only would you have a lag of close to 3 hours, but communication would be completely impossible for a month or so at a time.
Naive question, but would bit-flip also be a problem without the atmosphere to shield (some) radiation?
Yes but also no. Bit flips will happen unless you have rad-hardened computers but apparently, bit-flips are not really too problematic for LLM training. I guess when correct answers are optional, correct buts are as well.
I can’t tell if “correct buts” is just a genius detail in this comment… Or a genius happy little bitflip accident.
talks about this, in conclusion yes
Thats not a naive question at all. You’re totally right. The term to learn about this is “rad-hardened computing”. It’s a solved problem, but the solution involves a buttload of redundancy and extra silicon with huge performance reductions compared to non-hardened tech.
It’s less of an issue if you’re in the shadow of the sun but still quite a big issue.
So they would need to swallow up even more of our chip fab production and push ram and SSD prices even further through the roof for checks notes ah yes… the same functionality as they have on earth.
AI is already unprofitable because of the insane hardware requirements and the fact that no company has a “moat” so there is a race to the bottom pricing-wise… I can’t imagine anyone also then accounting for building space-hardened kit and getting it into space and dealing with shortened lifespan of the kit is ever gonna see a return.
All this just so that a chatbot can confidently tell people the wrong stuff
Maybe for a space based population a data center in space would work. This is just taking off site hosting too far.
“beyond the cloud” 🤮
Introducing: Microsoft Cosmos!
Send your data to heaven while we turn the planet into hell!
Plus the problem of having my data hosted, not just In another country, but In a different celestial body!
Ah shit, this is all for child porn again… Can the fucking tech industry just not do this every few months?!
Shame you can’t do some sort of thermoelectric power generation thingie with all the heat from these data centres.
You can’t turn pure heat into useful energy. Thermoelectric generators tap into the transfer of heat between a hot reservoir and a cold reservoir.
So assuming a water cooloant system, the water is heated and then the question how efficiently can you use this to generate energy? Even the simplest scenerio of pumping this water to a place where hot water is needed and would normally be produced by heating it with gas or elecetricity is a means of producing energy. Wouldn’t probably work here though as the water coolant system is a closed loop so you can’t have water leave the system. It still could pass through another reservoir of water to heat it up which then could be used for other purposes. But don’t know about specifics enough to guess whether or not this is feasible.
