[ericd]

Ok, why are so many being built in Northern Virginia, rather than in the middle of nowhere where there will be no backlash?

And permitting is challenging in part because it’s so different from place to place. Their permitting process with the FAA seems pretty streamlined.

[XorNot]

> Ok, why are so many being built in Northern Virginia, rather than in the middle of nowhere where there will be no backlash?

Right? So if that's the case why would putting them in Space, far less accessible in every conceivable way, with numerous additional expenses and engineering constraints, be cheaper?

[ericd]

Yeah, I don't know if it wins on cheaper, even with $2M fully reusable starship launches. Maybe rollout speed vs piecing together BD deals with a bunch of different infra providers? The expansion of the grid is going to be hamstrung until congress finally passes energy permitting reform, which they've tried and failed at repeatedly. But they could do non-interconnected microgrids in the desert like Redwood Materials has been trying.

Maybe there's a concentration in VA because there's a set of deals/procedures in place with infra providers there that make it easy to scale up, similar to how DE has well developed corporate infrastructure, so everyone incorporates there. But that stops when the area hits its limit in power provision (which seems to be happening right now). In which case, being able to do this yourself end to end by putting this stuff in space with your own power generation makes it the ultimate scale-up opportunity - no real limits on space or power availability, so once you get that method down, you can mass-scale and get great economies of scale. Maintenance isn't a thing, these will be disposable.

I think that's it, money's not the limiting factor if they can pitch this successfully, which I think they will. They want massive scale without the constraints you hit when doing it on earth. I think he's aiming for scale that we haven't seen in DCs on earth.

[schiffern]

  >why would putting them in Space, far less accessible in every conceivable way, with numerous additional expenses and engineering constraints, be cheaper?

Because mostly AI is power hungry, and in space you need 1/5th the solar panels, almost no solar panel support structure, and almost no daily load shifting batteries.

As it turns out, this matters more than launch costs or cooling radiators or radiation bit flips. This is why you need to do the math instead of assuming you know what the solution looks like.