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Why put data centers in space? (mander.xyz)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
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I am just honestly confused. There seem to be no logical reason for it, except that it would raise the stock value of rocket producers like SpaceX and Blue Origin.

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[–] 5 points 1 day ago (1 child)

There is zero economic reason. Most optimistic cost estimates are 5x more expensive than earth systems powered by solar and batteries. With near term optimism 10x more expensive.

The only reason is skynet that is immune for anyone in the US pulling the plug from skynet. Russia/China can already hit sattelites or terrestrial datacenters with missiles, and space ones are more vulnerable because Americans are more likely to cheer destruction of skynet assets used to oppress them.

The other factor is international law permits squatters rights to the most desirable orbits. 300 years from now, we may need power/data beemed to/from space. Privatizing it for oligarchy is a great long term investment if it is subsidized by US government.

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  • [–] 2 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 child)

    I remember watching a real engineering video, the white paper for it doesn't go into properly explaining the cooling mechanism. There were plenty of other problems too, but this alone was enough for me to know it's running on pure hopium.

    Oh and you cannot just use the corporate maths in this and not count initial costs, and costs of assembling the whole thing. Estimated area of solar panels for a datacenter of 5GW was 12.5km² assuming the best of the solar technologies used. The initial cost of putting it up there would be so high, it might even dwarf the lifetime operation cost.

    In my opinion, it's just another grift like hyperloop ko keep the AI bubble from popping.

    Edit:5 not 4gw

    Edit 2: I had watched the video long ago, and I glossed over a lot of things,

    https://youtu.be/_qpdUNMt2yg

    Here's a link to the video to go watch yourself

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  • [–] 1 point 12 hours ago

    That video is very poor, for focusing on a red herring of trying to build a monolith 1gw datacenter in space. There is no plan for such. Instead a mesh of smaller (fits in 1 rocket) datacenters that each have their own solar/radiators auto deployed with the datacluster. Inference does not need fast networking between clusters as models fit in a single cluster easily.

    It's still completely uneconomic because even GPUs that survive 5 years, are worthless after 5 years. Plan is to trash the datacenters every 5 years including the solar and radiators.

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