[awei]

The one thing that space has going for itself is space. You could have way bigger datacenters than on Earth and just leave them there, assuming Starship makes it cheap enough to get them there. I think it would maybe make sense if 2 things: - We are sure we will need a lot of gpus for the next 30-40 years. - We can make the solar panels + cooling + GPUs have a great life expectancy, so that we can just leave them up there and accumulate them.

Latency wise it seems okay for llm training to put them higher than Starlink to make them last longer and avoid decelerating because of the atmosphere. And for inference, well, if the infra can be amortized over decades than it might make the inference price cheap enough to endure additional latencies.

Concerning communication, SpaceX I think already has inter-starlinks laser comms, at least a prototype.

[notahacker]

You can't just "leave them there" though. They orbit at high speed, which effectively means they actually take up vastly more space, with other objects orbiting at high speed intersecting those orbits. The orbits that are most useful are relatively narrow bands shared with a lot of other satellites and a fair amount of debris, and orbits tend to decay over time (which is a problem if you're in low earth orbit because they'll decay all the way into the atmosphere, and a problem if you're in geostationary orbit because you'll lose the advantage of stationary bit for maintaining comms links). This is a solvable problem with propulsion, but that entails bringing the propellant with you and end-of-life (or an expensive refuelling operation) when it runs out. The cost of maintaining real estate space is vastly more than out right owning land.

Similarly, making stuff have a great life expectancy is much more expensive than having it optimized for cost and operational requirements instead but stored somewhere you can replace individual components as and when they fail, and it's also much easier to maximise life expectancy somewhere bombarded by considerably less radiation.

[LegionMammal978]

There is lots and lots and lots of space on Earth where hardly anyone is living. Cheap rural areas can support extremely large datacenters, limited only by availability of utilities and workers.

[awei]

We also have to build a lot more solar and nuclear in addition of the datacenters themselves, which we need to do anyway but it would compound the land we use for energy production.

[LegionMammal978]

Yet a colossal number of servers on satellites would require the same energy-production facilities to be shipped into orbit (and to receive regular maintainence in orbit whenever they fail), which requires loads of land for launch facilities as well as processing for fuel and other consumable resources. Solar might be somewhat more efficient, but not nearly so much so as to make up for the added difficulty in cooling. One could maybe postulate asteroid mining and space manufacturing to reduce the total delta-V requirement per satellite-year, but missions to asteroids have fuel requirements of their own.

If anything, I'd expect large-scale Mars datacenters before large-scale space datacenters, if we can find viable resources there.

[awei]

It makes sense, I would be curious to see the price computations done by the different space GPUs startups and Big Tech, I wonder how they are getting a cheaper cost, or maybe it is marketing.

[moffkalast]

Launching a datacenter like that carries an absurd cost even with Starship type launchers. Unless TSMC moves its production to LEO it's a joke of a proposal.

Underwater [0] is the obvious choice for both space and cooling. Seal the thing and chuck it next to an internet backbone cable.

> More than half the world’s population lives within 120 miles of the coast. By putting datacenters underwater near coastal cities, data would have a short distance to travel

> Among the components crated up and sent to Redmond are a handful of failed servers and related cables. The researchers think this hardware will help them understand why the servers in the underwater datacenter are eight times more reliable than those on land.

[0] https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...

[awei]

I like the underwater idea did not think of that

[reilly3000]

The problem is a lot of people like the underwater idea and I’m worried we’re heading towards something like literally boiling the ocean as they say.

[moffkalast]

No worries, the oceans are cooked already.

https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chapter/technical-summary

[toast0]

Space is not much of an issue for datacenters. For one thing, compute density is growing; it's not uncommon for a datacenter to be capacity limited by power and/or cooling before space becomes an issue; especially for older datacenters.

There are plenty of data centers in urban centers; most major internet exchanges have their core in a skyscraper in a significant downtown, and there will almost always be several floors of colospace surrounding that, and typically in neighboring buildings as well. But when that is too expensive, it's almost always the case that there are satellite DCs in the surrounding suburbs. Running fiber out to the warehouse district isn't too expensive, especially compared to putting things in orbit; and terrestrial power delivery has got to be a lot less expensive and more reliable too.

According to a quick search, StarLink has one 100g space laser on equipped satellites; that's peanuts for terrestrial equipment.

[cactusfrog]

We have tons of space on earth. Cooling in space would be so expensive.

[0_____0]

Falcon heavy is only $1,500/kg to LEO. This rate is considerably undercut here on Earth by me, a weasley little nerd, who will move a kilogram in exchange for a pat on the head (if your praise is desirable) or up to tens of dollars (if it isn't).

[skywhopper]

In exchange for what benefit? There is literally no benefit to having a datacenter in space.

[brandonagr2]

The benefit is capturing a larger percentage of the output of the sun than what hits the earth.

[tom_]

Can that really work? The datacentre will surely be measurably smaller than the earth.

[ethmarks]

Does your transportation system also have a risk of exploding catastrophically mid-flight? 'cause otherwise no deal. /s

[skywhopper]

Starship is on a fast track to failure. It is not a cheaper way to get to orbit and will never get there at the current pace. And even if it were, it would not make getting to orbit so cheap that it would somehow make it economically viable to put a datacenter there.

You still have to build the GPUs, etc for the datacenter whether it’s on Earth or in orbit. But to put it in space you also need massive new cooling solution, radiation shielding, orbital boosting, data transmission bandwidth, and you have to launch all of that.

And then, there are zero benefits to putting a datacenter in space over building it on Earth. So why would you want to add all that extra expense?

[tjpnz]

It will make getting to orbit cheaper, significantly so, but I can't see it being rapidly reusable. Rapidly refurbishable perhaps if Starship were modular and the heat shield could be quickly swapped out on site where necessary. But being able to top off the methalox and fly again? That's a pipe dream. Orbital spaceflight isn't like air travel in any sense.

[creatonez]

What use is having lots of space, when to actually build out that space you need mass, which is absurdly expensive to launch?

[moomoo11]

Why does what it powers matter? As long as it can power something.

The obsolete stuff can be deorbited or recycled in space.