[verandaguy]

I need to understand what possible benefit there is to doing DCs in space. The cost would be, no pun intended, fucking astronomical. The cooling situation would make no sense at all -- the major up-and-coming application of DCs, LLM training, has absurd cooling requirements even here on earth where convective cooling is an option, to the point where many DCs use open-loop cooling. Latency might be better, in some cases, I guess, but probably not by some groundbreaking amount.

Who is this product for? How the hell did "data centres in space" make it into the prospectus at all?

More to the point, why is Morningstar being so generous with their interpretation of that line of business? It's plainly insane, and you don't need an advanced degree in physics to understand why.

[NathanKP]

It's easy to see the benefit in DC's in space if you look at a few ingredients:

1. The recent Iran drone attacks on AWS data centers

2. Growing anti-AI and anti data center sentiment at home, plus Larry Fink (ceo of Blackrock) in a recent interview being terrified of dissident groups using consumer drones to attack data centers.

3. Anthropic, Grok, and other AI vendors becoming more and more integrated into defense and military, plus increasingly reliance on AI for other national surveillance systems

Data centers are and will be targets, both for national military attacks as well as home grown dissident attacks, so they are proposing to move some of the critical workloads to somewhere that the only group that can attack the data center hosting the workload is a nation state with space launch capabilities. That significantly reduces the number of actors that can attack the data center. And if the US wants to they can probably bomb all the other space rocket launch facilities worldwide in less than 24 hours, leaving extremely limited capability to attack a space hosted DC.

Is it insane? Probably, but the US has done insane things with military budget before, and will continue to do so for a long time. If you are Elon, its a great time to milk that US defense budget for some more R&D, and even if the main project doesn't work out, he's still going to be able to keep some innovations within the company and apply them to Starlink and other more realistic endeavors.

[Grombobulous]

Even with this benefit of the doubt, even stretching our suspense of disbelief as far as it can go, we are basically talking about a niche military application that inherently has a limited market value.

In other words, we can just assume this concept is possible and makes sense some level of financial sense for military, government, and high sensitivity use cases.

Well, find me a military contractor worth $1.5 trillion. Lockheed Martin is worth 1/10th of that.

Put Lockheed Martin and AT&T together and you’ve got about 1/5 of a SpaceX IPO target valuation.

Even if we make this assumption that the technology is marketable and has merit, it’s not like every company or government agency is going to want to switch to this technology. There are already a number of alternatives that can mitigate many to all of the risks that it solves.

The cost and complexity right now to deploy global services and their disaster recovery replicas to multiple distant data centers in the terrestrial world is already extremely low. Often, these features are offered as an off-the-shelf service.

California could sink into the ocean and my users wouldn’t even see a blip of downtime. Unless they live in California.

Heck, build some data centers underground in deep fortified bunkers if you want. That would be cheaper than launching them into space. They might even be easier to defend than satellites and space DCs because a foreign adversary can’t just launch a missile up in the sky to get to it.

Going back to not really suspending disbelief as much, I also think performance and latency is going to be an insurmountable problem. Right now as we speak Starlink residential service is about 10x slower than my home fiber connection at the same price. How is this technology going to compete with data center level infrastructure even in an optimistic scenario?

I can toss pennies per hour at Amazon for a relatively small VM with like 4GB of RAM and they’ll give that thing a 15 gigabit connection.

[NathanKP]

> Starlink residential service is about 10x slower than my home fiber connection at the same price. How is this technology going to compete with data center level infrastructure even in an optimistic scenario?

Where I live in New Zealand the only good internet provider is Starlink, so all my internet is through Starlink. The latency is about 20ms, so while yes you are technically correct that is 10x slower then 2ms, it isn't a major deal breaker.

You are probably thinking about light and fast API calls, where latency is more noticeable. But if you are doing an inference or LLM job that is going to take several seconds of token generation before the full response is available then the difference between 3.002s and 3.020s is negligible.

> build some data centers underground in deep fortified bunkers if you want.

This is the defensive build. The US has a tendency to optimize for offense.

Let's roll forward another few decades, and imagine a classic dystopia scenario: pervasive worldwide surveillance systems, armed drones and robots everywhere, etc. Where does the data from those surveillance systems get crunched, and where do the drones and robots get controlled from? Probably not from one central system in one place. That would ironically be too high latency. These systems would most likely end up as generic shells with minimal on board smarts, controlled by AI "brains" up in LEO, 20ms away via radio. The AI observes from overhead via it's surveillance systems, and it acts via it's robot bodies down on Earth.

It sounds like sci-fi, but you have to remember the world is full of megalomaniac nerds. They love this type of stuff, and if they think someone might be able to build it, then they want to be the one to build it.

[Grombobulous]

I think that vision you paint of satellite-commanded robots makes reasonable sense. At the very least, we can assume it does.

But then I go back to my original question where I ponder whether that vision results in a gigantic company.

I look at some of the contracts I found some news articles about: Space Force has a $437 million (not billion) contract with ViaSat and SES, the Pentagon is said to be spending $13 billion on LEO satellite programs.

And we can’t forget that SpaceX doesn’t actually make any of the robots. They only make the communications stack.

AT&T has a market capitalization of about $150 billion, for comparison.

[Delphiza]

If the only benefit of space-based datacentres is a hedge against infrastructure attacks in a world war then we are in an awful place.

I'm not disagreeing with you but peace is far more prosperous for humanity than blowing the worlds' retirement funds on datacentres-in-space as a military endeavour.

[Ekaros]

Also. I would not fully trust argument that all possible adversaries are incapable of attacking them. Possibly with cascading effects at least when you get size of satellites planned.

[Grombobulous]

I would like to add to my reply to this comment, that heat management in space is extremely difficult.

The idea that we can manage heat in a data center scale in low earth orbit is pretty much impossible.

Look into the physics of the problem and how heat transfer works in the vacuum of space.

[archagon]

It’s trivial to attack things in space if you also have stuff in space. Just ram your cheap satellites into the other guy’s. Do it right and the destruction will cascade.

[themafia]

1 -- Signal jamming exists.

2 -- Space also belongs to the citizens and not the corporations.

3 -- The defense industry is the single worst most corrupt and idiotic industry we still shackle ourselves to.

[mayama]

> 1 -- Signal jamming exists.

How easy is jamming starlink? I don't think it is as easy as jamming gps. As I've seen numerous warning from Russia that they providing starlink to Ukraine is bad idea. That they're going to shut it down etc. But, starlink is still being used in Ukraine.

[frm88]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2026/01/13/kill-swit...

Prior to these events, the prevailing consensus in the defense community was that Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations like Starlink were nearly impossible to jam effectively. Their defense relied on the satellites' constant rapid movement and their ability to "frequency hop" to avoid static interference. The blackout in Iran has shattered this assumption.

https://www.jfeed.com/news/starlink-iran-china-jamming

[Terr_]

> Who is this product for?

1. Using one part of Musk's holdings to trick people into feeling optimistic about how it will do incest with another part.

2. Megalomania dreams of becoming the Tessier-Ashpools from Neuromancer with their private fiefdom.

[tim333]

The main argument is if you scale up a lot you run out of electricity supply on Earth.

[sumeno]

There is no benefit, and they aren't going to actually do it in any meaningful way. When was the last time Elon Musk made a factual forward looking statement about one of his companies or products? It's all just bullshit, no need to dig deeper than that.

[piloto_ciego]

It's so you don't have to ask anybody for permission. That's it.

Right now, 70% of the country is at least skeptical of DCs and at worst absolutely hate them. NIMBY is basically the rallying cry. That's why you go "up" (if they can make starship work). The physics is "hard" but doable, you can keep them cool enough in a sun synchronous orbit. The math pencils out. It's not my field, but back of the envelope math seems to work. Scott Manley has a video on it if you're skeptical.

But, people keep thinking about this like "return on investment" is the only thing driving this play. They're literally the only company with a mostly reusable system (unless you count that company trying in China?). They're the closest company to a fully reusable launch vehicle. They have a ton of government contracts with star shield. After Bezos' rocket blew up last week, there's basically nobody close to competing with starlink...

I am not a Musk fanboy, but, like, there is literally no other serious space competitor right now. I mean, "maybe" Boeing? But not really - they're years away...

So, like if you read about the Memphis Datacenter - Colossus I think? They're unable to get power, they're pulling in power from Mississippi to keep the thing running. You know how many times they have to ask permission for that? The infrastructure costs there just to power it start to get absurd too. Then the unending line of approvals and environmental impact studies and permits. For all the people saying, "it'd be cheaper on earth" it might be in terms of dollars, but if you can basically iterate entirely unfettered in space, it's the obvious choice if you can make it happen.

Like, seriously, go try to build something, there are a LOT of rules outside of rural areas. It's literally why my wife and I decided to build our cabin where we are building, because there were basically no restrictions. Meanwhile in town, my buddy's deck was a nightmare to permit... it was a deck, not bridge. Seriously, to all the people saying, "it's easier" go try to get something built in a big city or where you have to fight through permit hell.

These tech oligarch guys view this (I think rightly - it's one of the only things I view them as right on) as a race to AGI against the Chinese. We're in the lead right now, cool, but the Chinese have excess kilowatts and we don't. In fact, we don't have adequate power plant infrastructure at all and we couldn't get the power plants built if we wanted to (the Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson book Abundance touches on this topic if you're curious as to why). It's not going to happen.

But up? No NIMBYs in space (yet). So they're going to go where nobody will tell them "no." At least, that's what I would do if I owned a literal rocket company.

People are all looking at this stuff through the lens of "money" as if that matters hardly at all after AGI, lol. The analysts are looking at this like it's 1995. I mean, PE ratios are important, don't get me wrong, but after 2016, and Trump, and the applications of transformers, and the war in Ukraine (and current shit show in Iran), and the rising price of fuel, and, well I'll stop, the list goes on and on, but acting like the "normal" rules of investment apply is just silly. This stuff is about power, and he who controls access to orbit is worth a basically unlimited amount of money...

Do I wish it was happening differently? Yup. But hey, we decided to give up on space as a country like 50 years ago, maybe we can try to do cool stuff in space now.

[enraged_camel]

>> It's so you don't have to ask anybody for permission. That's it.

This doesn't make sense because there's one party whose permission you always must ask, and that's the government. They are the ones who get to decide whether you can launch your rockets.

A more accurate version of your claim would be: datacenters in space allow you to deal with one party (i.e. the government) instead of many. So long as your relationship with that one party is good, your business plan is safe.

[piloto_ciego]

Fair (at least for now, maybe in a decade we will be manufacturing stuff up there, but for now, yeah).

Totally fair - and with Star Shield and basically SpaceX being the only reasonable launch provider, and a Musk-Friendly government currently in the executive… then I think my thesis holds. The only people who can tell SpaceX no at that point are like 3 nation states with ASAT capabilities?

Regardless, he won’t have to ask the “city” counsel of Asslick Indiana if he can “please build here pretty please!”

Mark my words, they’re going to build “up.l

[preg_match]

> It's so you don't have to ask anybody for permission. That's it.

I would think this is a very temporary victory. You only don't have to ask permission right now because nobody is doing it. But space does actually belong to people, as in there are a lot of different stakeholders with their own motivations. And, that also naturally includes every country's military. I don't foresee everyone just rolling over and accepting massive amounts of space junk without at least getting their piece of the pie.

I also don't think we gave up on space as a country. We have Artemis. I think we sort of realized that there isn't much in space. Outside of science-y stuff and research, there's really nothing to do. There's no products to be made, and our country revolves around consumerism. I think space DC's will be the same story. Does it make sense from a money perspective? Because I think that's really the only perspective that matters.