[GMoromisato]

If energy is indeed the limiting factor here, then maybe the companies building space-based compute (in which energy scales linearly) will remain after the wildfire.

The key is for them to build before the money runs out--I'm not sure they will have enough time.

[m4rtink]

That is a very optimistic scaling assumption - and would almost certainly require substantial in space infrastructure (large scale lunar and asteroid mining and refining, lunar mass drivers, at least solid core nuclear drives) before you can even thin building all the necessary radiators and structural mass.

[LogicFailsMe]

Mid-Century at least optimistically. All of this will play out before then, but broadly, those who can code the machines will survive and thrive as they always do. Except for the older ones, it will be yet another excuse to jettison all that experience and talent because of the gray hair that makes them creatively dead from the neck up according to youthful disruptive beach loving Vinod Khosla.

[GMoromisato]

Starlink (collectively) already has 10 times the solar power of ISS, with present-day launch capabilities. If Starship works out (not guaranteed) launch cost should drop to ~$100/kg, which would enable very large constellations.

Musk is planning for 1 megaton/year of satellites, each with 100kW, yielding about 100GW per year.[1]

He thinks they can do that in 4 years, but adjusting for Elon-time, it's probably no less than 8 years, if ever.

But will the AI money last that long? Maybe not.

-------------

[1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1997706687155720229

[m4rtink]

Sure, it is impressive how much solar power Starlink currently captures, but ISS actually does not get that much - as far as I can tell its about 250 kW maximum even with the new roll-out solar arrays that have been installed quite recently.

So about 2.5 MW of solar potential ? That's indeed quite impressive, but for serious compute a lot of energy needs cooling will eat into that.

[GMoromisato]

Cooling won’t use much energy because it’s mostly radiators and probably some recirculating pumps.

[m4rtink]

I think there could be a non trivial ammount of pumping.

Also building all the radiators and structure from in-space resources could be quite substantial energy investment, same with the energy to put it in the final orbit.

[bdangubic]

https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...