It’s such a hilariously dumb idea I hope the tech bros sink millions into it.
Lets make a data center we can’t maintain, upgrade or access for any practical reason. Waiting for the suggestions to put them in geostationary orbits so that way their latency is even higher but going to struggle staying powered when in Earth’s shadow. Or get put in the Earth-Sun L1 so they always have solar power but now have to have significant more radiators on top of even MORE latency beyond beyond the moon’s orbit.
The “good idea” isn’t the data centers but the stock pumping. You propose something insanely difficult and expensive (also hopelessly impractical and stupid in this case) and because it is so difficult and expensive you claim you can monopolize the market if you succeed which is the ultimate dream of every capitalist but you just need some insane amount of investment to get there. Then when the money runs out you go back and ask for more and exploit sunk cost fallacy. All the while valuations increasing. It is an amazing way for already rich scammers to get much, much richer than could happen in a sane economy and slurp up huge amounts of capital that otherwise could have gone into more productive endeavors.
Obviously in any well regulated economic system this shit would be subject to some proper oversight to protect the interests of the majority, particularly all the people whose pensions and livelihoods are at risk when this all goes to shit.
I had a conversation with a colleague of mine about this. He believed that Musk’s decision to merge xAI and SpaceX was truly because of the potential of datacenters in space. I was unable to convince him that the logistics of this would be a nightmare and that this was just a way to make the Twitter buyout SpaceX’s problem.
I don’t know how that even got past the brainfart stage. AFAIK nobody has actually demonstrated how that would really work.
- Despite SpaceX’s advancements in regards to things like resutable rockets, shooting stuff into space is still prohibitively expensive.
- Server clusters are exceptionally heavy.
- Server clusters run hot, cooling is not a triviality considering you can’t just rely on convection in space, so more mass for alternative solutions.
- Datacenters need regular maintenace.
- Logic boards won’t do well with the radiation in space.
- Despite SpaceX’s advancements in regards to things like sattelite internet, getting large datacenter level quantities of data from earth into space and back, and at low latency, is no triviality.
Not saying this won’t ever be a thing. But not in the lifetime of anybody on earth right now I don’t think.
People don’t understand just how difficult it is to cool stuff in space. Half of the shit sticking out of the ISS that people think are solar panels are actually radiant cooling systems, and the ISS will generate WAY less heat per volume than a data center.
Not to mention the power requirements would likely require more than solar unless they put solar panels up far bigger than anything put up there before.
Not saying this won’t ever be a thing.
I’m saying it
This whole idea reminds me of the “putting solar panels on highways” idea that keeps popping up from time to time. Anyone who has ever built anything understands how stupid it is. Even if you could do it, it still wouldn’t make sense over just putting solar panels next to highways.
That, and solar windows.
Making an expensive solar panel that lets most of the energy pass through it, and is not mounted in a way to effectively collect solar energy, is a terrible idea.
There is an unsolvable compute problem. The average PC on earth has multiple bit-flips a year from cosmic rays. The space hardened chips we use are 50nm and the chips used from inference are 4 to 6nm. 50nm is far more cosmic ray resistant than 6nm because of the transistor size. Are we supposed to think making H100s with a 65nm process is possible? The speed of light creates a die size limitation as well.
I agree, that this is at the moment not a viable thing and especially the SpaceX “concept” is complete bullshit.
I do not agree with some of your points, since they are solved/irrelevant (e.g. “regular maintenance”, “low latency”) or could be overcome with reasonable tech advances (e.g. “rockets prohibitively expensive”, “radiation shielding”).
Let me steelman the argument a bit with this single bit of - sadly forgotten - “super cool and innovative tech”: “Underwater data center”, like project Natick (Microsoft) or the Chinese project:
Soooooo, if we will ever see something other than our current land based data centers, we will see millions of ocean data centers, before we will ever see a single commercial space data center.
Reasons:
- Delivery is super cheap (in comparison to space) at scale, thanks to the already existing wind farm infrastructure
- Weight is not an issue
- Cooling is solved
- Maintenance is not necessary, but replacement is. Easy on scale, because modular.
- No radiation shielding necessary
- Connection: data cable = no extra lag or quantity limit
Oh, and by the way, it is still not clear if even ocean data center will be viable. Just found this 😂
getting large datacenter level quantities of data from earth into space and back, and at low latency, is no triviality.
Latency is a huge issue, but so is bandwidth.
Land based data centers will have multiple hundred gig (and faster) fiber connections to the outside world.
Replicating that level of bandwidth on wireless links to a satellite in any sort of stable way is (as you said) no triviality. I would even classify it as near impossible.
They’ll manufacture it on the moon ofc. We won’t ship it from earth.
Unless it becomes cheaper than having a datacenter on earth per quanity of compute, it won’t happen in any meaningful scale even if these issues are solved.
What about the latency hit getting data back to earth?
It will never be an economic thing. Only unpluggable skynet military thing. The weight is not an issue. though. It’s volume.
Weight is always the issue with lifting stuff into space. Volume might merely be an additional issue.
The $200/kg launch price target is based on 150 ton capacity. That’s a $30m launch costs target. Volume/foldability matters the most because that is the actual constraint that limits datacenter launch to a single NVL72 size.
Projected cost targets from SpaceX, especially for Starship are only losely related to reality. Weight is what determines the minimal required energy input to lift something into orbit. Independently from SpaceX number magic. Volume, like I said, can be an additional bottleneck but never undo the above.
most of the fuel weight required is to lift the rest of the fuel. Fuel costs is about $1m for full load. Rest of cost is huge staff, maintenance, and capital cost of rocket.
Starship is huge. I dont know how tightly they can fold these expected dishes, but by weight, they can amd will do 60 starlink v3, and itd be 50 datacenter dishes equivalent. How many they can actually launch is going to depend on how well the solar and radiator folds down, so it might be a volume issue vs weight where they cant launch with the max weight capabilities of the ship.
The datacenters are only a little bigger than a v3 starlink. It’s 1 rack of compute, around 125kw avg 150kw peak. The biggest part is the solar array.
You would need staff living up there to support them. Robotics isn’t up to it.
It makes sense if we have a space elevator and also invert the way most of the physics of data centers work.
If and only if someone is insane enough to develop off-planet manufacturing with the bulk of the raw materials originating from somewhere in deep space, e.g. asteroid mining, putting data centers in space might be useful for problems that demand intensive compute and can work with extreme latency.
Then again that’s like saying inventing the airplane would have been a good strategy for Neanderthals to find better firewood.
You could put em on the moon with a heatpump into the ground.
The cost per pound to get them there is insane.
They are seriously old in 2 years.
They could put them in deserts here with closed loop cooling.
or… hear me out… Maybe we DON’T NEED THAT MUCH AI…
You could put em on the moon with a heatpump into the ground.
The interior of the moon is not super cold. You could still run a heat pump, but I don’t know what the conductivity is like.
“Near” the surface, it’s apparently around -21C, but its one crazy trick is surface area for heat sync. Once we start pushing heat into it, we’d have to do it in a REALLY huge surface area. Moon trenching…
If you read the chart on that Wikipedia article carefully, the estimated temperature profile is based on data from two Apollo missions.
All of the Apollo missions spent all of their surface time during the lunar morning, relatively early into the 14-day lunar day. They did this partially because the cooling systems couldn’t cope with the full heat of the day, and partially to ensure good backlighting during the landings.
So there is going to be some “diurnal” surface heating and cooling that is probably modeled but not measured.
pulled it off a science substack, lined up nicely with https://science.nasa.gov/moon/weather-on-the-moon/
was unaware that data was incorrect
They want to put them where normal people cannot damage them.
It’s so expensive. Putting data centers in bunkers or caves is more reasonable. (There actually are data centers like this).
Proton’s primary servers are stuffed in a cold war bunker in the Alps, for example.
Is it still like that?
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Are we talking about a vacuum of copper or a vacuum of feathers
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No you’re just confident despite your ignorance. Turning waste heat into electromagnetic radiation is not easy or efficient - 100 to 350W per square meter in current space craft. The sheer scale of radiators necessary in a orbital data centre would dwarf the footprint of the servers themselves.
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Perhaps you can educate us instead of being mad at the world?
Thanks but I’d like to not read Billy Madison’s lecture on thermal dynamics based on magic and fairy dust.
I don’t know if you realize this but losing heat by radiating it away is incredibly slow and inefficient.
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It does matter because it means it’s not a solution.
Never said it was. But if you want a solution NASA figured it out almost 3 quarters of a century ago. If the cooling solution is the thread that makes or breaks the concept sure you could justify being this irrational I guess or you could find the next better reason to be against data centers in space. Upto you.
You just need something like ~256,000 m² or like 60% the size of vatican city of radiators to dissipate 1mw power at 300k, I calculated it https://crazypeople.online/post/20952535/9448375
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You sound like you think you’re making a point but you’re kinda just saying nonsense in the face of this not being viable.
Man, you can’t be this pedantic and this incorrect, all at the same time.
The “there is no air in space therefore datacenters in space are a bad idea” crew is not going away. Are you even human?
You don’t understand how heat dissipation works.
We got Musk fanboys on Lemmy before GTA 6.
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When i did i say anything of that? Are you ok buddy?
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Check how many square meters of copper radiators per human you need on ISS and then do the math kwh for a datacenter and you will get more tonnes of material than any material on the hole planet earth and now you understand why it’s your idea that’s removed from any intelligent discourse.
Or why would I bother educating you. Go and invest in companies building data centers in space, vote for them, idc
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Black body radiation is a real, but it’s an extremely inefficient way to get rid of excess heat. So you’d need huge radiators to get enough surface area.
Add to this the fact that terrestrial data centers operate at a loss, and there’s no way to run a space based one profitably.
plus trying to dissipate heat in space, which is mostly a vacumn is a problem too.
“Black body radiation” is the physical process by which you “dissipate” (the correct word here is “radiate”) heat in space.
In space you can’t just have the heat be passed from the radiator to some “substance” that fills space (like on Earth the heat is passed to air or to water that then gets released to the environment) because almost all of space is empty of matter (not exactly: there’s incredibly low density stuff in it, mainly ions, but such low density means pretty much no available mass to sink the heat), so the only way for that heat to leave is the natural physical process of a warm body emitting photons merely because of its temperature (the wavelength of which depends on temperature) which is called Black Body Radiation.
As others have pointed out, it’s a way less efficient process that dissipating heat by it being passed from the radiator directly to some substance that’s part of the environment (i.e. transmission).
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Please reconsider your use of the “R” word. It is not harmless. People try to say “it just means stupid” but we all know what people that word refers to. They also know this word, and know it’s used in reference to them.
They don’t deserve it. My wife, for example, used to teach Shakespeare in theatrical classes in the adult day school she worked at. Her student absolutely were capable of learning that and understanding it fully.
Yeah, language evolves over time. But just as I hope you wouldn’t call a Black person “colored” because that term is currently not appreciated (even though it was the preferred in decades past), I hope you would consider removing the “R” word from your vocabulary as well.
They’re arguing in favor of AI. They already don’t care about other people, unfortunately.
I skimmed the title for a sec and thought “what’s wrong with orbital stations?” before realizing the utter stupidity that graced my vision.
And yet the IPO of SpaceX was justified with the presumed future success of its space-based data center program.
Wait is that really a thing
Yes. He unironically promised to build data centers in space. So basically, his company’s stock went up, because he falsely advertised something that is practically impossible to achieve at this time.
Hasn’t he said full whee drive automatically driving your car would be availbe a decade ago and it’s still not here
There are entire websites dedicated to tracking his “promises” and lies.
Basically, if you believe a word that guy says at this point, you deserve to lose all your money.
The one I heard was a fleet of Tesla self-driving taxis across the US by 2025.
Instead we have news reports of Teslas on autopilot killing people while the driver is distracted.
Yes. That’s not even the most flagrant one
It’s comical how finance is the most ‘vibes’ based of any discipline, yet they try so hard to LARP as hard math/science experts. Much projection for such massive insecurity, it seems.
Well that’s investors fault for believing him isn’t it. The biggest thing ever put up in space is the international space station we don’t even have the capability to do that anymore. How did they think he was going to build a data centre in orbit? Which of course is completely ignoring all the other technical reasons wouldn’t work.
It’s like Tesla: Everyone knows it’s a scam. Whenever there’s a panic or a dip then Musk’s army of sock puppets and wash traders will coordinate to purchase more stock and drive the value back up. That’s how TSLA has remained so ridiculously over valued for decades.
It’s an exponential money printer that’s going to break the entire world eventually.
Shits gonna be like 99% radiator
One consumer grade graphics card surrounded by the largest heatsink ever produced.
“That ought to do the trick!” 😆
Reagan approves
Self landing rockets were practically impossible not that long ago. Self driving cars were practically impossible not that long ago.
There’s nothing fundamentally impossible about orbital data centres. The main factor against it is the $/kg of payload into space. That’s one of the many issues SpaceX is working to solve, and there’s nothing to suggest they won’t get there.
The limiting factor for space data centers is absolutely not the cost to build them. The AI industry has already proven that they will burn the GDP of a small country just to have an LLM that shits out slightly better text that has coin flip level odds of being true.
The limiting factor here is one of thermodynamics. A travel mug for coffee works because it has a near vacuum between the inner lining and the outer shell. Vacuums are fantastic insulation because there’s no atoms there to transfer heat away. Very useful if you want hot coffee for a few hours. Space is a big vacuum, and data centers are giant heat generators. You’re basically putting a computer in a perfect insulation medium. It’s really stupid.
Came here to say this, thanks.
There have been many, many articles about how the only limiting factor left is cost. Thermal radiation is a thing.
Self landing rockets were practically impossible not that long ago
Technically, they still are.
Self driving cars were practically impossible not that long ago.
There have been implementations of a sell-driving vehicle since the 1980s, and we’re still far away from “true” full self diving.
Both of these examples demonstrate the adage of “the first 90% of the work takes 10% of the effort, and the last 10% work takes 90% of the effort”.
The main factor against it is the $/kg of payload into space.
Oh my lord no. Although, technically yes but not for the reason you think.
The number one issue is heat dissipation. To radiate the heat from one DC satellite (at the power levels needed to run AI workloads) would need a football sized dissipation array. Even if Space X can invent some magical new physics and cut that down to a quarter of that size (hint: they can’t), we’re still talking about an order of magnitude increase in payload per satellite.
Next on the list is volume. We’re currently at around 14k man-made objects in low earth orbit. As it is, satellites (including the ISS) have to perform collision avoidance maneuvers every so often. The calculated limit of satellites we can put up to low earth orbit before orbital collision maneuvers start to become unmanageable is 100k. Basically after that amount we enter into a state where several corrections for each satellite are made regularly, and a single collision at the 100k limit would result in a cascading series of collisions that will render low earth orbit impossible to use. Basically after that anything you put up will get shredded by the insane amounts of debris.
Space X wants to put up a MILLION massive satellites that will require extremely large structures to dissipate the heat from the very power hungry AI chips.
They fully know the impossibility, and when challenged about the over crowding issue during an interview, an engineer brushed it off as “it’s not a problem”. People who speak that way about science and engineering issues are not serious people.
That’s one of the many issues SpaceX is working to solve, and there’s nothing to suggest they won’t get there.
There are countless engineering and physics reasons why they won’t. Stop sniffing Elon’s farts. They’re not good for your brain.
Edit: all of this is to say: space datacentres are the dumbest idea yet to come out of that idiots face hole. And he’s said a lot of really really dumb things.
I suspect Musk is trying to ensure his satellites are up before anyone else’s, so when the inevitable legislation is enacted to control who launches what, he already “owns” the lion’s share of “orbital real estate”.
They’re not going to put up these satellites, because they won’t be close to usable or affordable. Either the workloads will be miniscule, or the cost to put them into orbit is prohibitive.
The whole pitch was a cool sounding “space age” solution to a problem with AI datacentres that everyone is aware of. It was just a snakeoil salesman’s promise just so he could con investors out of money for his sweet 1.7 trillion.
So like you said, I’m correct. The only issue with thermal radiation is $/kg of payload. Again, this is an issue that they’re working to solve via methods like reusable rockets.
So like you said, I’m correct. The only issue with thermal radiation is $/kg of payload.
That’s not what you said. You implied the only limiting factor is a reasonable payload that can be resolved by the current incremental improvements to rocket tech.
What I said is that even with massive improvements to rocket tech, it will still be a near impossibility to get as many AI (or even regular datacentre) satellites into space.
The other issue is that the thermal dissipation problem is not solved for such a large amount of heat in space. It’s quite hard to dump large amounts of heat in space, and it needs to be done rapidly with computing. And the larger you make your dissipators the more you run into “how do I move that heat from the source and out towards the edge of the dissipators?” Because you need to utilize ALL of the dissipator if you want to keep your server parts cool. But moving that heat around a massive array is not trivial. If you’re using a fluid and moving it with pumps, then now your adding even more heat with the pumps.
And then there’s the issue with long term investment. These server components are going to be obsolete in a few years (and nevermind failures). And IIRC, they have plans to regularly de-orbit these things every number of years, which means even more launches at a regular basis to keep the swarm numbers constant.
And none of that matters in the face of the low earth orbit crowding issue that IS a massive problem.
Completely different level of difficulty.
And be pedantic self-driving cars are not a solved problem. If you try driving a Tesla in autopilot and don’t intervene when it makes mistakes you’ll be in a wall within about 2 minutes.
Building data centres in space isn’t just a technical problem, although it’s a major technical problem, it’s also an economic problem. Obviously yes it’s physically possible to do it but there’s no way of building a data centre in space for anything close to the price of just doing it on earth and with no other obvious advantage to it being in space there’s no reason to do it.
It’s the same reason we don’t build a transatlantic railroad tunnel. Obviously it’s technically possible it’s just a very long tunnel, but it would be hella expensive.
So like I said, the only problem is payload cost……
Free unlimited power is the benefit……
Right so go build a space elevator because little old Elon is not going to fix that no matter what he tells you. Even if you could get starship working you need something with 100 times the lift capacity.
Elon Musks companies have done so many things that people like you said he couldn’t do lol. You’re so blinded by irrational hate for someone who doesn’t even know you exist.
Other people have already explained the topic in sufficient detail, so I’ll just leave a quote from a former NASA engineer and a link to their article.
Taking the NVIDIA H200 as a reference, the per-GPU-device power requirements are on the order of 0.7kW per chip. These won’t work on their own, and power conversion isn’t 100% efficient, so in practice 1kW per GPU might be a better baseline. A huge, ISS-sized, array could therefore power roughly 200 GPUs. This sounds like a lot, but lets keep some perspective: OpenAI’s upcoming Norway datacenter is intending to house 100,000 GPUs, probably each more power hungry than the H200. To equal this capacity, you’d need to launch 500 ISS-sized satellites. In contrast, a single server rack (as sold by NVIDIA preconfigured) will house 72 GPUs, so each monster satellite is only equivalent to roughly three racks.
Source: Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.
It all comes down to $/kg of payload. There’s infinite space up there.
How is this a rational argument? With infinite money we could put the Empire State building on Venus but it would be really fucking stupid.
It’s rational because the payload cost is coming down and down and down with SpaceX. Reusable rockets was a massive step.
Once it’s affordable, why wouldn’t they do it?
Not just experts but an 11-year-old with a mild interest in space could have explained to these techbros why this wouldn’t work as an idea.
Even if it could be made to “work”, the idea that it would somehow be superior to or more economical than a terrestrial facility is madness.
It would make sense if there’s no space left on earth to build new datacenters, but the simple solution to that is just to stop building so many datacenters.
Basically they’re trying to build a data centre where the most expensive part of the data centre is the building itself which is completely not how it’s supposed to work.
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- slow clap *
Does that moniker apply to the ones who support or criticize it?
as much as underwater datacenter, extremely high cost despite the ocean being able to cooldown datacenters fast. also these large LLM have never overcome one major flaw, There is no profit generation in the industry.
There is no profit generation in the industry.
That’s because we’re in relatively early R&D and are trying to speedrun things in a way we generally don’t with most tech. To compare to tech you understand and are familiar with, where we’re at currently would be equivalent to like the internet in the late 80s/early 90s, except we’ve all seen how that went and everyone wants to be the Amazon, Microsoft or Google of the AI market when it moves from high R&D and little to no profit to becoming a mainstream part of everyday life.
That transition point will probably be when bipedal robots that can do most tasks as well as a human while running a local model get cheap enough to be sold as industrial equipment. It’s why Asian labs (especially Chinese ones) keep showing off bipedal robots doing tasks that require either significant agility or fine motor skills involving predicting where body parts are (like doing needlepoint without being able to see it’s hands or doing dance routines).
Just billionaire psychosis like where ai got to where it is to begin with. Obviously they’re all visionaries leading the world to a better place…
