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by zoogeny 3 days ago
If xAI is a datacenter REIT, it is a special kind that has a promise that no other datacenter provider could dream of: LEO datacenters. As far-fetched as that may sound, the biggest profit center for SpaceX in my understanding was Starlink. xAI already has extremely high-bandwidth connections from Earth to LEO available. Connecting that to solar powered orbital datacenters seems doable in realistic timeframes, especially once Starship comes online and gives them a significant boost in launch capacity.

If that ends up being viable and profitable, there is no realistic competition for decades. In this view, xAI earning a reputation as a reliable AI hyperscaler is just another tactic in that strategy.
2 comments
LearnYouALisp 3 days ago
Cost per pound? Then $/Watts/TFLOPS minus cost per pound?

Out of curiosity (since I basically never saw $/lb mentioned in any replies anywhere on this, which is hilarious; like talking about having your grain mill at 10,000ft/in the mountains since sunlight is better there): Have you ever tried a forSpace Program?

(And not only 100mi or more above, they're 17,500 mph faster--Mach 22 Datacenters in an oxygen-free, higher-radiation, insulated environment with absolutely no resources)

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zoogeny 3 days ago
I have not done any calculation on the capex but I'm guessing that SpaceX has. We're also just guessing on what these "datacenters" will look like. It is silly to think of them in the same way we see the football-field-sized ultra secure facilities on land. They can be highly distributed in a way that just wouldn't make sense on land. Perhaps even incrementally built out in the same way that Starlink capacity was.

Regardless, if Google is spending just shy of 1 billion USD per month, that suggests that there is a pretty high ceiling on capex available.

Consider the PR of massive datacenters here on Earth. People complain about noise, water usage. It doesn't even matter if those concerns are valid, the PR is bad enough. That might attract other massive corps that want to outsource instead of deal with the headache of building local.

You realize that not long ago companies were exploring building nuclear power sites next to their data centers to handle the expected power needs?

I'm not saying it will work. I'm saying if it does, SpaceX will own the market for a good while.

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martinky24 3 days ago
You're hand waving the whole "data center" part away. Comms is one thing. That's probably 1% of the challenge.
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zoogeny 3 days ago
Sure, but considering the size of the challenge it makes sense to figure out the parts that can be studied on the surface first. Challenges like procuring, challenges like setting up relationships with potential customers. You probably want to figure out everything you can so that when you move on to the hard part you aren't distracted by the rest.

Consider the alternative. SpaceX figures out how to build the datacenter in space thing but fails at the rest. That would be an expensive mistake.

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