| > 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. |
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.