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by diabllicseagull 133 days ago
if I may add, you can't really launch a station three times the size of ISS with a single rocket so there will be multiple launches. Just the launch costs alone could likely finance multiple similarly sized server rooms on land.
1 comments
pointlessone 132 days ago
It should be smaller than ISS. IIRC, ISS has three solar arrays and two radiators. DGX is about the size of a fridge. Let’s add two more fridges worth of infra for solar and radiator. Maybe another fridge for comms. But these three fridges replace all the modules of ISS. It’s still gonna be about 6 (maybe up to 10?) tons of mass to lift. But Starship can do 100-150 tons to LEO so might be doable.
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shagie 131 days ago
What is the power budget for that DGX. The power budget for ISS is 75–90 kW. If your DGX fridge needs more power, it will need similar capacity of solar and radiators.

https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/rising-power-...

> In 2027, the unified approach will almost certainly be taken to new levels as NVIDIA's “Kyber” system will launch, with 576 GPUs in a single rack requiring a whopping 600 kW, equivalent to delivering enough power for 500 US homes into the space of a filing cabinet.

That fridge needs 600 kW of power. That will require 6x more solar panel space than the ISS and 6x more radiators. It's not about the volume of the object but rather its power and heat budgets.

If that fridge can reject all of the heat from the rack in space, it will work much better on earth and all the data centers would be using that fridge instead of their cooling towers and AC.

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pointlessone 131 days ago
DGX is only 10,2 kW. But also only 8 H200s. Kyber seems a bit more power efficient (per-GPU) but requires much more power for a single unit. With that power requirement it doesn’t seem like it will fly.
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shagie 130 days ago
10 kW is something that could be household load (a backup generator for a home when there's a power outage).

If one could put a DGX in my basement without issue (there's an idea - would you trust me with a DGX rack in my basement for six months for winter heating? https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/27/data-centers-ai-district-hea... ), what is the value of shipping it into space? Granted, I couldn't afford a DGX in my basement... but it's not one DGX that you're putting in a datacenter, but rather racks upon racks of aisles upon aisles.

Putting a dozen DGX into space and needing the solar and radiator capacity of the ISS doesn't necessarily seem like the best value proposition. And also noting that the ISS has people onboard that do repairs to exactly those systems ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maintenance_of_the_Internation... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maintenance_of_the_Internation... ). If that happened to the space data center it would be "might as well deorbit it and contact our insurers."

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