[WalterBright]

> but they cost 1000x as much

Compute power has increased more than 1000x while the cost came down.

I recall paying $3000 for my first IBM PC.

> they need to last years and not fail

Not if they are cheap enough to build and launch. Quantity has a quality all its own.

[queenkjuul]

Have you heard of cosmic radiation?

[WalterBright]

Cosmic rays take time to destroy them.

[tecleandor]

It's not only about destruction. It's also about reliability. Without proper shielding and error correction you're going to have lots and lots of reliability issues and data corruption. And if we're talking about AI and given the current reliability problems of the Nvidia hardware, plus the radiation, plus the difficulty for refrigerating all that stuff on space... That's a big problem. And we still haven't started to talk about the energy generation.

I think there's a very interesting use case on edge computing (edge of space, if you wanna make the joke) that in fact some satellites are already doing, were they preprocess data before sending back to Earth. But datacenter-power-level computing is not even near.

I have no idea and numbers to back it up, but I feel it would be even easier to set up a Moon datacenter than an orbital datacenter (when talking about that size of datacenter)

[WalterBright]

We'll see!

Keep in mind that the current state of space electronics is centered around one-off very expensive launches, where the electronics failure would be a fiscal disaster. (See JWST)

Being able to rapidly launch cheap electronics may very well change the whole outlook on this.

[queenkjuul]

People already do that (launch cheap, redundant, unshielded electronics) for LEO, but sounds like these data centers would pretty explicitly not be in LEO.

Also AI GPUs are the exact opposite of cheap electronics