[naet]

I think starlink made intuitive sense; we already use satellites to transfer data for phone service and TV channels, a satellite can "see" a large area to service, the technology was there already, etc. Starlink provides a service you can't really get without going to space (coverage in remote areas).

The space data center doesn't make intuitive sense to me. Why put it in space? Wouldn't it be better just... on the ground? The technology doesn't feel like it's there either, and there would be significant competition from existing or new data centers that don't have all the drawbacks of orbiting the planet.

[ericd]

The US power grid is not able to keep up with demand, it's mired in red tape. There's also a populist revolt against DCs and the infra upgrade costs being dumped on ratepayers. That's the main benefit I see of their plan, from a US perspective. I think China probably will have a significantly easier time.

[zarzavat]

> The US power grid is not able to keep up with demand, it's mired in red tape

Why not build off-grid?

> There's also a populist revolt against DCs and the infra upgrade costs being dumped on ratepayers.

What about the other 94% of the Earth's landmass?

[ericd]

>Why not build off-grid?

He sort of is. I believe people aren't very happy with his gas turbines powering Colossus near Memphis. There's also currently a >5 year backlog for nat gas turbines for combined cycle plants.

Solar takes up an enormous amount of space to get to reasonable base load, because you have to massively overpanel in order to carry it through winter. You need a large multiple of the panels you'd need in space to get to reliable baseload, plus batteries. During grey winter weeks, our home array is frequently making like 1/6 what it does during summer, and even summer days have night/weather/etc compared to sun sync orbits.

Nuclear is hilariously expensive and slow to build. But I have some hope for small reactors and Commonwealth Fusion Systems/Helion.

>What about the other 94% of the Earth's landmass?

Geopolitical concerns, infrastructure/power availability, security, since these things are full of incredibly valuable hardware.

[zarzavat]

> Geopolitical concerns, infrastructure/power availability, security, since these things are full of incredibly valuable hardware.

The market decides that, not Elon. Do customers want to pay $X for compute in Iceland (or wherever), or do they want to pay $kX for compute in space?

What premium are customers willing to pay for compute in space? I would guess that the premium is actually negative because the quality of computation in space is worse than under the sweet embrace of Earth's atmosphere which provides a natural protection against radiation.

[ericd]

No premium, it's just a question of whether people can and are willing to build enough in those other places. Space is a bet that they can't. Also, I don't think bitflips are a huge deal in space for neural nets, we already build in randomness via temperature. A little more shouldn't make things noticeably worse. Higher energy particles could be a problem over time, but when I looked into it, it looked like the incidence of very damaging particles for a given area was surprisingly low.