[mayama]

After articles on how starship is never getting off launchpad, I'm sceptical of news regarding elon, pro and anti. Sure, things like FSD are hopium or scam, but not everything could be. Haven't seen hard science estimates on their new ai satellites.

[zarzavat]

The issue with AI datacenters in orbit is not science or engineering but economics. There is no practical reason why it can't be done, but why would anyone want to buy compute from such a datacenter when they could pay substantially less money for better capacity on Earth?

Orbit is a bad place for a datacenter. Your equipment will be hot and bombarded with radiation. You can't do any repairs. Even with reusable rockets you still have to pay for fuel to launch everything into orbit. You get a small benefit of more efficient power generation but it's not worth all the downsides.

If you want to have solar-powered AI datacenter that you can't service, you'd be way better off building the power generation in a coastal desert and building your datacenter underwater.

[tyre]

With the rockets, it was more, “wow that seems impossible, but incredible if you can pull it off versus existing options.”

With the space data centers, it’s more, “Okay yeah so let’s say you do…why?”

It just seems like a really hard thing to do when the available options are, like, the Chinese building data centers on the Tibetan plateau where it is cold, ample renewable energy, tons of land, and, like, oxygen.