[space_fountain]

It's like this. Everything about operating a datacenter in space is more difficult than it is to operate one on earth.

1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit

2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low

3. Refurbishment is next to impossible

4. Networking is harder, either you are ok with a relatively small datacenter or you have to deal with radio or laser links between satellites

For starlink this isn't as important. Starlink provides something that can't really be provided any other way, but even so just the US uses 176 terawatt-hours of power for data centers so starlink is 1/400th of that assuming your estimate is accurate (and I'm not sure it is, does it account for the night cycle?)

[WillPostForFood]

What about sourcing and the cost of energy? Solar Panels more efficient, no bad weather, and 100% in sunlight (depending on orbit) in space. Not that it makes up for the items you listed, but it may not be true that everything is more difficult in space.

[3eb7988a1663]

Let's say with no atmosphere and no night cycle, a space solar panel is 5x better. Deploying 5x as many solar panels on the ground is still going to come in way under the budget of the space equivalent.

[cmenge]

And it's not the same at all. 5x the solar panels on the ground means 5x the power output in the day, still 0 at night. So you'd need batteries. If you add in bad weather and winter, you may need battery capacity for days, weeks or even months, shifting the cost to batteries while still relying on nuclear of fossil backups in case your battery dies or some 3/4/5-sigma weather event outside what you designed for occurs.

[Certhas]

Or you put the data centers at different points on earth?

Or you float them on the ocean circumnavigating the earth?

Or we put the datacenters on giant Zeppelins orbiting above the clouds?

If we are doing fantasy tech solutions to space problems, why not for a million other more sensible options?

[cmenge]

> Or you put the data centers at different points on earth? > Or you float them on the ocean circumnavigating the earth?

What that does have to do with anything? If you want to solar-power them, you still are subject to terrestrial effects. You can't just shut off a data center at night.

> Or we put the datacenters on giant Zeppelins orbiting above the clouds?

They'd have to fly at 50,000+ ft to be clear of clouds, I doubt you can lift heavy payloads this high using bouyancy given the low air density. High risk to people on the ground in case of failure because no re-entry.

> If we are doing fantasy tech solutions to space problems, why not for a million other more sensible options?

How is this a fantasy? With Starlink operational, this hardly seems a mere 'fantasy'.

[ndsipa_pomu]

> You can't just shut off a data center at night.

Why not?

A capacity problem can be solved by having another data center the other side of the earth.

If it's that the power cycling causes equipment to fail earlier, then that can be addressed far more easily than radiation hardening all equipment so that it can function in space.

[mike_hearn]

That's with current launch costs, right? Nobody is claiming it's economic without another huge fall in launch costs, but that's what SpaceX is doing.

[michaelmrose]

It wouldn't make sense if launch was free and it will never be

[PunchyHamster]

just take cost of getting kg in space and compare it to how much solar panel will generate

Current satellites get around 150W/kg from solar panels. Cost of launching 1kg to space is ~$2000. So we're at $13.3(3)/Watt. We need to double it because same amount need to be dissipated so let's round it to $27

One NVidia GB200 rack is ~120kW. To just power it, you need to send $3 240 000 worth of payload into space. Then you need to send additional $3 106 000 (rack of them is 1553kg) worth of servers. Plus some extra for piping

[cmenge]

Over 10 years ago, the best satellites had 500W/kg [2]. Modern solar panels that are designed to be light are at 200g per sqm [1]. That's 5sqm per kg. One sqm generates ca. 500W. So we're at 2.5kW per kg. Some people claim 4.3kW/kg possible.

Starship launch costs have a $100/kg goal, so we'd be at $40 / kW, or $4800 for a 120kW cluster.

120kW is 1GWh annually, costs you around $130k in Europe per year to operate. ROI 14 days. Even if launch costs aren't that low in the beginning and there's a lot more stuff to send up, your ROI might be a year or so, which is still good.

[1] - https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/space/ultr... [2] - https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/12824/lightest-pos...

[mkesper]

What if you treat that launch costs goal as just a marketing promise. Invest in reality, not in billionaire's fantasies.

[cmenge]

> What if you treat that launch costs goal as just a marketing promise.

Then it's roughly 10x-15x and still works.

> Invest in reality, not in billionaire's fantasies.

SpaceX has dramatically reduced payload cost already. How is that a fantasy?

[OrvalWintermute]

Current state of the art Radhard & Rad Tolerant compute are way more expensive than terrestrial.

[edoceo]

I'm stretched to think of one thing that is easier in space. Anything I could imagine still requires getting there (in one piece)

[esquivalience]

Death, and some science. That's it?

[ljsprague]

Horseshoes.

[blipvert]

Achieving a zero-gravity environment, or a vacuum?

[DharmaPolice]

Noise insulation.

[pclmulqdq]

Solar panels in space are more efficient, but on the ground we have dead dinosaurs we can burn. The efficiency gain is also more than offset by the fact that you can't replace a worn out panel. A few years into the life of your satellite its power production drops.

[serallak]

If they plan to put this things in a low orbit their useful life before reentry is low anyway.

A quick search gave me a lifespan of around 5 years for a starlink satellite.

If you put in orbit a steady stream of new satellites every year maintenance is not an issue, you just stop using worn out or broken ones.

[kibwen]

Terrestrial data centers save money and recoup costs by salvaging and recycling components, so what you're saying here is that space-based datacenters are even less competitive than we previously estimated.

[ericd]

No idea how quickly they wear out in space with 24x7 irradiance and space temps, but on the earth, they’re at something like 80% capacity after 25 years. So seems like you could control how long they have via overpanelling?

[duskwuff]

> Solar panels in space are more efficient...

... if you completely ignore the difficulty of getting them up there. I'd be interested to see a comparison between the amount of energy required to get a solar panel into space, and the amount of energy it produces during its lifetime there. I wouldn't be surprised if it were a net negative; getting mass into orbit requires a tremendous amount of energy, and putting it there with a rocket is not an efficient process.

[obidee2]

My sketchy napkin math gives an order of magnitude of a few months of panel output to get it in space.

5kg, 500W panel (don’t exactly know what the ratio is for a panel plus protection and frame for space, might be a few times better than this)

Say it produces about 350kWh per month before losses.

Mass to LEO is something like 10x the weight in fuel alone, so that’s going to be maybe 500kWh. Plus cryogenics etc.

So not actually that bad

[smileeeee]

The cost might be the draw (if there is one). Big tech isn't afraid of throwing money at problems, but the AI folk and financiers are afraid of waiting and uncertainty. A satellite is crazy expensive but throwing more money at it gets you more satellites.

At the end of the day I don't really care either way. It ain't my money, and their money isn't going to get back into the economy by sitting in a brokerage portfolio. To get them to spend money this is as good a way as any other, I guess. At least it helps fund a little spaceflight and satellite R&D on the way.

[actionfromafar]

It's just tax payer money, who cares right? :)

[murderfs]

> The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low

Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean...

[mlyle]

Another significant factor is that radiation makes things worse.

Ionizing radiation disrupts the crystalline structure of the semiconductor and makes performance worse over time.

High energy protons randomly flip bits, can cause latchup, single event gate rupture, destroy hardware immediately, etc.

[Aerolfos]

If anything, considering this + limited satellite lifetime, it almost looks like a ploy to deal with the current issue of warehouses full of GPUs and the questions about overbuild with just the currently actively installed GPUs (which is a fraction of the total that Nvidia has promised to deliver within a year or two).

Just shoot it into space where it's all inaccessible and will burn out within 5 years, forcing a continuous replacement scheme and steady contracts with Nvidia and the like to deliver the next generation at the exact same scale, forever

[XorNot]

And just like that you've added another not never done before, and definitely not at scale problem to the mix.

These are all things which add weight, complexity and cost.

Propellant transfer to an orbital Starship hasn't even been done yet and that's completely vital to it's intended missions.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean

Hell, you're going to lose some fraction of chips to entropy every year. What if you could process those into reaction mass?

[3eb7988a1663]

I believe that a modern GPU will burn out immediately. Chips for space are using ancient process nodes with chunky sized components so that they are more resilient to radiation. Deploying a 3nm process into space seems unlikely to work unless you surround it with a foot of lead.

[mike_hearn]

Or cooling water/oil?

[JumpCrisscross]

> Or cooling water/oil?

Oh. You surround it with propellant. In a propellant depot.

[mike_hearn]

Hah, kill three birds with one stone? The satellites double up as propellant depots for other space missions, that just happen to have GPUs inside? And maybe use droplet radiators to expel the low grade heat from the propellant. I wonder if that can be made safe at all. They use propellant to cool the engine skins so... maybe?

[falcor84]

This brings a whole new dimension to that joke about how our software used to leak memory, then file descriptors, then ec2 instances, and soon we'll be leaking entire data centers. So essentially you're saying - let's convert this into a feature.

[lambdaone]

It's certainly one way to do arena-based garbage collection.

[notahacker]

Reminds me of the proposal to deorbit end of life satellites by puncturing their lithium batteries :)

The physics of consuming bits of old chip in an inefficient plasma thruster probably work, as do the crawling robots and crushers needed for orbital disassembly, but we're a few years away yet. And whilst on orbit chip replacement is much more mass efficient than replacing the whole spacecraft, radiators and all, it's also a nontrivial undertaking

[sanex]

Or maybe they want to just use them hard and deorbit them after three yesrs?

[zeofig]

"Planning" is a strong word..

[trhway]

>1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit

putting 1KW of solar on land - $2K, putting it into orbit on Starship (current ground-based heavy solar panels, 40kg for 4m2 of 1KW in space) - anywhere between $400 and $4K. Add to that that the costs on Earth will only be growing, while costs in space will be falling.

Ultimately Starship's costs will come down to the bare cost of fuel + oxidizer, 20kg per 1kg in LEO, i.e. less than $10. And if they manage streamlined operations and high reuse. Yet even with $100/kg, it is still better in space than on the ground.

And for cooling that people so complain about without running it in calculator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878961

>2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low

it will live those 3-5 years of the GPU lifecycle.

[javascriptfan69]

Current cost to LEO is $1500 per kg

That would make your solar panel (40kg) around $60K to put into space.

Even being generous and assuming you could get it to $100 per kg that's still $4000

There's a lot of land in the middle of nowhere that is going to be cheaper than sending shit to space.

[trhway]

>That would make your solar panel (40kg) around $60K to put into space.

with the GPU costing the same, it would only double the capex.

>Even being generous and assuming you could get it to $100 per kg that's still $4000

noise compare to the main cost - GPUs.

>There's a lot of land in the middle of nowhere that is going to be cheaper than sending shit to space.

Cheapness of location of your major investment - GPUs - may as well happen to be secondary to other considerations - power/cooling capacity stable availability, jurisdiction, etc.

[estomagordo]

> with the GPU costing the same, it would only double the capex.

Yes, only doubling the capex. With the benefits of, hmm, no maintenance access and awful networking?

[ndsipa_pomu]

Don't forget the major problem with cooling

[iso1631]

> jurisdiction

This is the big thing, but Elon's child porn generator in orbit will be subject to US jurisdiction, just as much as if they were in Alaska. I guess he can avoid state law.

If jurisdiction is key, you can float a DC in international waters on a barge flying the flag of Panama or similar flag of convenience which you can pretty much buy at this scale. Pick a tin-pot country, fling a few million to the dictator, and you're set - with far less jurisdiction problems than a US, Russia, France launched satellite.

[blackoil]

Any idea, what is the estimated cost of a Google TPU. It may not make sense for Nvidia retail price but at cost price of Google.

[trhway]

Can only speculate out of thin air - B200 and Ryzen 9950x made on the same process and have 11x difference in die size. 11 Ryzens would cost $6K, and with 200Gb RAM - $8K. Googling brings that the B200 cost or production is $6400. That matches the numbers from the Ryzen based estimate above (Ryzen numbers is retail, yet it has higher yield, so balance). So, i'd guess that given Google scale a TPU similar to B200 should be $6K-$10K.

[ericd]

I think the disconnect is that with starship they’re targeting >200 tons/200,000 kg and $2m-$10m/launch, so the very optimistic case is more like $10/kg. Also, the production of a panel in sun sync orbit is many times one on the ground, doesn’t suffer seasonality/weather, and doesn’t require battery storage for smoothing/time shifting, so you’d need to deploy many times the number of panels on earth. Our home array in North America over the course of the year generates something like 1/7th of its theoretical capacity, overproduces in the summer, and underproduces in the winter.

[pclmulqdq]

> putting 1KW of solar on land - $2K, putting it into orbit on Starship (current ground-based heavy solar panels, 40kg for 4m2 of 1KW in space) - anywhere between $400 and $4K.

What starship? The fantasy rocket Musk has been promising for 10 years or the real one that has thus far delivered only one banana worth of payload into orbit?

[trhway]

it is obviously predicated on Starship. All these discussions have no sense otherwise.

> or the real one that has thus far delivered only one banana worth of payload into orbit?

once it starts delivering real payloads, the time for discussions will be no more, it will be time to rush to book your payload slot.

[gspr]

You are presented with a factual, verifiable, statement that starship has been promised for years and that all that's been delivered is something capable of sending a banana to LEO. Wayyyy overdue too.

You meet this with "well, once it works, it'll be amazing and you'll be queuing up"? How very very musky!

What a cult.

[ben_w]

I have no idea if SpaceX will ever make the upper stage fully reusable. The space shuttle having existed isn't an existence proof, given the cost of repairs needed between missions.

However, with Starship SpaceX has both done more and less than putting a banana in orbit. Less, because it's never once been a true orbit; more, because these are learn-by-doing tests, all the reporting seems to be in agreement that it could already deliver useful mass to orbit if they wanted it to.

But without actually solving full reusability for the upper stage, this doesn't really have legs. Starship is cheap enough to build they can waste loads of them for this kind of testing, but not cheap enough for plans such as these to make sense if they're disposable.

[ENGNR]

They also launched dummy satellites from the "pez dispenser", directly simulating the actual mission payload, about 4 months ago.

[viraptor]

> will come down to the bare cost of fuel + oxidizer

And maintenance and replacing parts and managing flights and ... You're trying to yadda-yadda so much opex here!

[trhway]

It is SpaceX/Elon who bet billions on that yadda-yadda, not me. I wrote "If" for $10/kg. I'm sure though that they would easily yadda-yadda under sub-$100/kg - which is $15M per flight. And even with those $100/kg the datacenters in space still make sense as comparable to ground based and providing the demand for the huge Starship launch capacity.

A datacenter costs ~$1000/ft^2. How much equipment per square foot is there? say 100kg (1 ton per rack plus hallway). Which is $1000 to put into orbit on Starship at $100/kg. At sub-$50/kg, you can put into orbit all the equipment plus solar panels and it would still be cheaper than on the ground.

[sarchertech]

It looks like you’re comparing the cost of installing solar panels on the ground with the cost of just transporting them to orbit. You can’t just toss raw solar panels out of a cargo bay.

[trhway]

>You can’t just toss raw solar panels out of a cargo bay.

That is exactly what you do - just like with Starlink - toss out the panels with attached GPUs, laser transmitter and small ion drive.

[sarchertech]

Best estimates based on the publicly available data I can find are that solar panels make up 5-10% of the manufacturing cost of a starlink satellite.

There’s so much overhead you’re hand waving away to make your numbers work.

[gf000]

> it is SpaceX/Elon

The known scammer guy? Like these ideas wouldn't pass the questions at the end of a primary school presentation.

[javascriptfan69]

100 x 100 is 10,000.

[bildung]

1 KW of solar panels is 150€ retail right now. You are probably at 80€ or less if you buy a few MW.

(I'm ignoring installation costs etc. because actually creating the satellites is ignored here, too)

[tpm]

installation of large solar plants is largely automated already

[iso1631]

My car costs far more per mile than the bare cost of the fuel. Why would starship not have similar costs?

[reverius42]

The bean counters at NVidia recently upped the expected lifecycle from 5 years to 6. On paper, you are expected now to get 6 years out of a GPU for datacenter use, not 3-5.

[blackoil]

To add space solar cell will weigh only 4-12kg as protection requirements are different.

[estomagordo]

source?

[blackoil]

:| Did rough calculations with help of ChatGPT. In space it need not be hardened for rain, hail, wind and dust but for radiation and micro meteors.

[shagie]

Compare the cost of a RAD750 (the processor on the JWST) to its non rad hardened variant. Additionally, consider the processing power of that system to modern AI demands.

[blackoil]

I just calculated the potential weight of solar cells in space. Can't say about cost. Idea is mot of the weight of panel is because of glass/plastic protection on top and frame, these are there to protect from rain, hail, wind and dust. In space the elements it will need protection from will be different. I could be completely off but have no claims on cost and feasibility of this.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Everything about operating a datacenter in space is more difficult than it is to operate one on earth

Minus one big one: permitting. Every datacentre I know going up right now is spending 90% of their bullshit budget on battlig state and local governments.

[dantillberg]

But since building a datacenter almost anywhere on the planet is more convenient than outer space, surely you can find some suitable location/government. Or put it on a boat, which is still 100 times more sensible than outer space.

[JumpCrisscross]

> since building a datacenter almost anywhere on the planet is more convenient than outer space, surely you can find some suitable location/government

More convenient. But I'm balancing the cost equation. There are regimes where this balances. I don't think we're there yet. But it's irrational to reject it completely.

> Or put it on a boat, which is still 100 times more sensible than outer space

More corrosion. And still, interconnects.

[GCUMstlyHarmls]

> More corrosion

Surely given starlinks 5ish year deorbit plan, you could design a platform to hold up for that long... And instead of burning the whole thing up you could just refurbish it when you swap out the actual rack contents, considering that those probably have an even shorter edge lifespan.

[m4rtink]

Starlinks are built to safely burn up on re-entry. A big reusable platform will have to work quite differently to never uncontrollably re-enter, or it might kill someone by high velocity debris on impact.

This adds weight and complexity and likely also forces a much higher orbit.

[necovek]

Hopefully a sea platform does not end up flying into space all of its own, only to crash and burn back down.

Maybe the AI workloads running on it achieve escape velocity? ;)

[vlovich123]

I can’t wait for all the heavy metals that are put into GPUs and other electronics showering down on us constantly. Wonder why the billionaires have their bunkers.

[m4rtink]

If you think there is no papework necessary for launching satellites, you are very very wrong.

[JumpCrisscross]

> If you think there is no papework necessary for launching satellites, you are very very wrong

I would be. And granted, I know a lot more about launching satellites than building anything. But it would take me longer to get a satellite in the air than the weeks it will take me to fix a broken shelf in my kitchen. And hyperscalers are connecting in months, not weeks.

[BurningFrog]

It's also infinitly easier to get 24/7 unadulterated sunlight for your solar panels.

[dantillberg]

Not 24/7 in low earth orbit, but perhaps at an earth-moon or earth-sun L4/L5 lagrange point. Though with higher latency to earth.

[BurningFrog]

There are Sun-Synchronous Orbits, and those are what SpaceX plans to use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit

[dantillberg]

Well, that's neat. TIL. Thanks for the link!

[fodkodrasz]

So what? Why is it important to have 24/7 solar, that you cannot have on the ground? On the ground level you have fossil fuels.

I wonder if you were thinking about muh emissions for a chemical rocket launched piece of machinery containing many toxic metals to be burnt up in the air in 3-5 years... It doesn't sound more environmentally friendly.

[BurningFrog]

Getting enough energy for your AI data centers is one of the most limiting factors for AI technology.

Solar in space is about 5-10x as effective as solar on the ground.

[fodkodrasz]

So what? Just build some nuclear power plants if AI data centers are so important. It can even work at night when it is infinitely as effective as solar on the ground!

Also I'm astounded how important AI data centers are when we are running out of freshwater, to mention a thing we could easily solve with focusing our efforts on it instead of this. But yeah, surely the Space AI Data Centers (aka. "SkyNet") is the most important we must build...

Also this is just about Elon jumping the shark...

[bdangubic]

that may have been the case before but it is not anymore. I live in Northern VA, the capital of the data centers and it is easier to build one permit-wise than a tree house. also see provisions in OBBB

[floatrock]

I mean, you don't have zoning in space, but you have things like international agreements to avoid, you know, catastrophic human development situations like kessler syndrome.

All satellites launched into orbit these days are required to have de-orbiting capabilities to "clean up" after EOL.

I dunno, two years ago I would have said municipal zoning probably ain't as hard to ignore as international treaties, but who the hell knows these days.

[JumpCrisscross]

> you have things like international agreements to avoid, you know, catastrophic human development

Yes. These are permitted in weeks for small groups, days for large ones. (In America.)

Permitting is a legitimate variable that weighs in favor of in-space data centers.

[viraptor]

> is spending 90% of their bullshit budget on battlig state and local governments

Source? I can't immediately find anything like that.

[kelseyfrog]

Parent just means "a lot" and is using 90% to convey their opinion. The actual numbers are closer to 0.083%[1][2][3][4] and parent thinks they should be 0.01-0.1% of the total build cost.

1. Assuming 500,000 USD in permitting costs. See 2.

2. Permits and approvals: Building permits, environmental assessments, and utility connection fees add extra expenses. In some jurisdictions, the approval process alone costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. https://www.truelook.com/blog/data-center-construction-costs

3. Assuming a 60MW facility at $10M/MW. See 4.

4. As a general rule, it costs between $600 to $1,100 per gross square foot or $7 million to $12 million per megawatt of commissioned IT load to build a data center. Therefore, if a 700,000-square foot, 60-megawatt data center were to be built in Northern Virginia, the world’s largest data center market, it would cost between $420 million and $770 million to construct the facility, including its powered shell and equipping the building with the appropriate electrical systems and HVAC components. https://dgtlinfra.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a-data-...

[viraptor]

Yeah, I was trying to be nicer than "you're making it up" just in case someone has the actual numbers.

[mike_hearn]

He said bullshit budget, not budget. He's thinking about opportunity and attention costs, not saying that permits literally have a higher price tag than GPUs.

[kelseyfrog]

Maybe try meditation? It can help deal with negative emotions.

[sapphicsnail]

What counts towards a bullshit budget? Permitting is a drop in the bucket compared to construction costs.

[deepGem]

This is a huge one. What Musk is looking for is freedom from land acquisition. Everything else is an engineering and physics problem that he will somehow solve. The land acquisition problem is out of his hands and he doesn't want to deal with politicians. He learned from building out the Memphis DC.

[markhahn]

Maybe, but I'm skeptical, because current DCs are not designed to minimize footprint. Has anyone even built a two-story DC? Obviously cooling is always an issue, but not, directly, land.

Now that I think of it, a big hydro dam would be perfect: power and cooling in one place.

[mbushey]

> Has anyone even built a two-story DC?

Downtown Los Angeles: The One Wilshire building, which is the worlds most connected building. There are over twenty floors of data centers. I used Corporate Colo which was a block or two away. That building had at least 10 floors of Data Centers.

[reverius42]

I think Downtown Seattle has a bunch too (including near Amazon campus). I just looked up one random one and they have about half the total reported building square footage of a 10-story building used for a datacenter: https://www.datacenters.com/equinix-se3-seattle

[lambdaone]

Multistory DCs are commonplace in major cities.

[bigfatkitten]

> Has anyone even built a two-story DC?

Every DC I’ve been in (probably around 20 in total) has been multi storey.

[deepGem]

Skepticism is valid. The environmentalists came after dams too.

[EdwardDiego]

So freedom from law and regulation?

[blactuary]

He "learned" by illegally poisoning black people

> an engineering and physics problem that he will somehow solve

no he won't