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by credit_guy 6 days ago
Why? It seems to me to be much cheaper than a building. Musk's aim is for the cost of one Starship launch to be under $10 million in the long run. 50 rocket launches would be less than half a billion dollars. Can you get a datacenter built on the ground for half a billion dollars?
5 comments
sumeno 6 days ago
Half a billion in JUST the rocket launches, you've still got to build the actual data center too.

That's assuming he can get launches down to $10 million which I'm sure will be right behind his flying roadster and cybertruck boat

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adgjlsfhk1 6 days ago
The comparison isn't half a billion for a datacenter, it's half a billion for a big shed (and some solar panels). The problem of space based data centers is that the only effort they save you is building a big shed to put the GPUs in (and potentially cheaper power at the cost of more expensive cooling)
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Symbiote 6 days ago
Using easily available numbers, a high quality distribution center building (heavy duty concrete floors, HVAC etc) is $100 per sqft.

A very large 1,000,000 sqft data centre is therefore $100 million.

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adammarples 6 days ago
You haven't built a data center for half a billion mate, you've just launched rockets. You still have to build the data centre! Only not from bricks, it's going to be complex modular units made of radiators and solar panels and you have to buy the gpus too, and the whole thing will be bombarded with cosmic background radiation but you can't replace or repair any part of it.
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LearnYouALisp 6 days ago
Are you for real? HN yep
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credit_guy 6 days ago
Yes, I am for real. The Colossus datacenter that xAI built cost $7 billion.

[1] https://www.globaldatacenterhub.com/p/can-elon-musks-7b-colo...

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ac29 6 days ago
Most of that cost was presumably the 100,000 GPUs it contains, they didn't even build the building
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credit_guy 5 days ago
Maybe, but in the end if the cost of launches is less than 10% the cost of the GPUs, then why is the project non-sense?
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adgjlsfhk1 3 days ago
"If you give me 5 years and everything goes perfect, I can give you a system that's 9% worse than what you already have", you don't have a great investor pitch.
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