It’s such a hilariously dumb idea I hope the tech bros sink millions into it.
Lets make a data center we can’t maintain, upgrade or access for any practical reason. Waiting for the suggestions to put them in geostationary orbits so that way their latency is even higher but going to struggle staying powered when in Earth’s shadow. Or get put in the Earth-Sun L1 so they always have solar power but now have to have significant more radiators on top of even MORE latency beyond beyond the moon’s orbit.
Space Nuttery is a mental illness.
It makes sense if we have a space elevator and also invert the way most of the physics of data centers work.
The “good idea” isn’t the data centers but the stock pumping. You propose something insanely difficult and expensive (also hopelessly impractical and stupid in this case) and because it is so difficult and expensive you claim you can monopolize the market if you succeed which is the ultimate dream of every capitalist but you just need some insane amount of investment to get there. Then when the money runs out you go back and ask for more and exploit sunk cost fallacy. All the while valuations increasing. It is an amazing way for already rich scammers to get much, much richer than could happen in a sane economy and slurp up huge amounts of capital that otherwise could have gone into more productive endeavors.
Obviously in any well regulated economic system this shit would be subject to some proper oversight to protect the interests of the majority, particularly all the people whose pensions and livelihoods are at risk when this all goes to shit.
Just billionaire psychosis like where ai got to where it is to begin with. Obviously they’re all visionaries leading the world to a better place…
I had a conversation with a colleague of mine about this. He believed that Musk’s decision to merge xAI and SpaceX was truly because of the potential of datacenters in space. I was unable to convince him that the logistics of this would be a nightmare and that this was just a way to make the Twitter buyout SpaceX’s problem.
Imagine launching that scale of infrastructure, loaded full of Nvidia chips that’ll be outdated in like 2 years.
Do we have a way to transfer heat into rock, because I’m thinking lunar data centers.
I skimmed the title for a sec and thought “what’s wrong with orbital stations?” before realizing the utter stupidity that graced my vision.
At medium earth orbit the minimum delay will be about 67ms (250 ms to 600+ ms for geostationary orbits) for LEO it is 25-50 ms. The average ground network ping on a good day is 1ms-20ms.
If and only if someone is insane enough to develop off-planet manufacturing with the bulk of the raw materials originating from somewhere in deep space, e.g. asteroid mining, putting data centers in space might be useful for problems that demand intensive compute and can work with extreme latency.
Then again that’s like saying inventing the airplane would have been a good strategy for Neanderthals to find better firewood.
At minimum how would the heat be managed? Also as someone else said, just getting the material from the earth into orbit is currently possible but why?
Argue? It’s a physics problem that has no solution.
I don’t know how that even got past the brainfart stage. AFAIK nobody has actually demonstrated how that would really work.
- Despite SpaceX’s advancements in regards to things like resutable rockets, shooting stuff into space is still prohibitively expensive.
- Server clusters are exceptionally heavy.
- Server clusters run hot, cooling is not a triviality considering you can’t just rely on convection in space, so more mass for alternative solutions.
- Datacenters need regular maintenace.
- Logic boards won’t do well with the radiation in space.
- Despite SpaceX’s advancements in regards to things like sattelite internet, getting large datacenter level quantities of data from earth into space and back, and at low latency, is no triviality.
getting large datacenter level quantities of data from earth into space and back, and at low latency, is no triviality.
Latency is a huge issue, but so is bandwidth.
Land based data centers will have multiple hundred gig (and faster) fiber connections to the outside world.
Replicating that level of bandwidth on wireless links to a satellite in any sort of stable way is (as you said) no triviality. I would even classify it as near impossible.
The datacenters are only a little than a v3 starlink. It’s 1 rack of compute, around 125kw avg 150kw peak.
If it’s one rack it’s kinda pointless? And also absurdly more expensive than putting that one rack almost anywhere else in the world. And you can’t really fix or upgrade it. And then it’s in space and more susceptible to bit flips.
I’m not sure there’s a single thing it being in space does that’s better than it not being in space.
One rack is generally going to be well more than enough for a persons inference needs.
They want to put a million of these up there long term, where are you going to find space for a million individual racks? Now it’s a large datacenter again.
I did see one thing about a company adding a cluster or something to someones house and giving them a cut of it. That decentralizes the power distribution, and space requirement, but it adds other problems like vandalism / theft as how well can you protect a thing tacked onto the side of a house worth 10s of thousands of dollars.
Edit: And you don’t fix or upgrade them, they deorbit in ~5 years, and get replaced with the next best thing. Radation protection to avoid bit flipping will be a cost issue, but they already have hardened chips that work in space, so I’m not sure how much new technology is needed, and starship can lift a shit ton of weight, so heavy shielding possibly an extra option?
Edit2: Just to be clear, I’m not trying to say they are going to earn enough revenue to make these things profitable like they did with Starlink, I’m just talking about the technical specs of what they say they’re going to do. There’s a lot of misconceptions about what they even intend to try putting up there.
Large data centres are used for a reason, it’s way more efficient to shove all the compute in one large building than putting it in space, at all.
Its a horrifically stupid idea, with no real benefit at absurd cost.
It’s not no real benefit, these are some, which are legitimate benefits.
- Unlimited sun, without the sun having to go through the atmosphere which increases the efficiency of the solar panel.
- No opposition / red tape from communities fighting against the data centers, some communities are evening banning them.
- No theft or vandalism.
Just to restate my relevant edit you probably didn’t see above
I’m not trying to say they are going to earn enough revenue to make these things profitable like they did with Starlink, I’m just talking about the technical specs of what they say they’re going to do. There’s a lot of misconceptions about what they even intend to try putting up there.
You can get more power from solar on the ground, cheaper, because it isn’t in space and they’ll get deorbited which is worse than vandalism because the entire thing is now gone.
I’m not disagreeing and saying they won’t do it, I’m just saying it’s an incredibly stupid idea.
That just increases the land space required though which makes it harder to get it built upfront, but I agree, land based solar, even taking 3x+ the land required + battery backup is probably still cheaper given they’ll last 20 years or more.
Ground projects like that take years to complete as well, between finding a spot, permitting, building it etc and to some extent time is money in this current environment.
Weight wise, they can launch 50 AI datacenters per launch with Starships 100T capacity, but volumetric wise I don’t know how well they can fold these up and if they’ll actually reach 50, but lets say they can get 50. I honestly have no idea if they can.
That’s 7.5MW of solar panels deployed each launch which will be coming off a factory line launching multiple times a week. They did 123 starlink launches in 2025, so thats 922.5MW solar capacity launched in a year if they did that with the AI sats, but they’ll likely do way more if starship actually works.
You can’t build an almost 1GW solar array (edit and datacenter) on land that quickly. (edit2: Oops I didn’t do the 3x+ for the 1GW solar i mentioned above, it would need to be 4-5GW on land so it can overproduce to store enough in the batteries)
The downside of course is it’s only going to last 5-10 years. That’s a lot of costs to try to recoup in that time frame.
There is an unsolvable compute problem. The average PC on earth has multiple bit-flips a year from cosmic rays. The space hardened chips we use are 50nm and the chips used from inference are 4 to 6nm. 50nm is far more cosmic ray resistant than 6nm because of the transistor size. Are we supposed to think making H100s with a 65nm process is possible? The speed of light creates a die size limitation as well.
Either that or they’d have to triplicate everything and have a voting system.
this is the current real solution on the ISS - three main computers doing everything.
How would that even work with inference where the expected output will be different between 3 runs with the same input?
The way I see it is they are doing inference, not transfiring bank account balances. I’d be curious to see some actual experimental data, but I’d expect LLMs to skip past bit flips same way you shrug and move on from spelling errors. At worst you can do your critical calculation in triplicate on your 6nm nodes (with redo upon dissensus) and reduce your bit error from 4/year (or 4000/year or whatever have you in orbit) to (4/year)^3
A bit flip might change a 0 to a 1 or a 1 to an infinity. Even if you could just do everything three times, that triples the hardware and energy costs compared to terrestrial computing.
People don’t understand just how difficult it is to cool stuff in space. Half of the shit sticking out of the ISS that people think are solar panels are actually radiant cooling systems, and the ISS will generate WAY less heat per volume than a data center.
Im seeing the ISS needs to reject 70kw with a max ability of 84kw. The datacenter dishes will be between 125 and 150, so around double or less.
Not to mention the power requirements would likely require more than solar unless they put solar panels up far bigger than anything put up there before.
Beyond the power requirements for the computer, there is also the power that will be needed to transmit back to earth.
A wireless link that can pass the amount of bandwidth needed (and do it reliably) will need huge power as well.
It will be far bigger. Its mostly solar panels.
Or one of those mini nuclear reactors they are working on
If we did make something like that, could you even put it on a disposable dish meant to burn up in the atmosphere after 5ish years? There’s already uncertainty about all the dishes burning up and long term impacts, but a mini nuclear reactor?
Not saying this won’t ever be a thing.
I’m saying it
This whole idea reminds me of the “putting solar panels on highways” idea that keeps popping up from time to time. Anyone who has ever built anything understands how stupid it is. Even if you could do it, it still wouldn’t make sense over just putting solar panels next to highways.
That, and solar windows.
Making an expensive solar panel that lets most of the energy pass through it, and is not mounted in a way to effectively collect solar energy, is a terrible idea.
What about the latency hit getting data back to earth?
LEO isn’t that far away. StarLink has quite good latency.
Whatever the end latency is, it’ll be higher than starlink as these are going to be in a sun synchronous orbit and they dont talk to earth, they talk via starlink.
So you’ll have to go up to starlink, then laser link the shortest route to the nearest available dish, then back.
Heh yeah you’d get daily latency variation.
Made me think of this, dish is far away right now! Obviously not that slow, but still haha.
You’d have to constantly adjust its orbit. Something that huge with massive radiators and solar panels is going to get a lot of drag.
1000km is still considered LEO and would take hundreds of years to decay. At this distance, you’d add 3ms of latency, which isn’t nothing but acceptable for most applications.
You would need staff living up there to support them. Robotics isn’t up to it.
You think they have people repairing and doing maintenance on starlink?
Unless it becomes cheaper than having a datacenter on earth per quanity of compute, it won’t happen in any meaningful scale even if these issues are solved.
I agree, that this is at the moment not a viable thing and especially the SpaceX “concept” is complete bullshit.
I do not agree with some of your points, since they are solved/irrelevant (e.g. “regular maintenance”, “low latency”) or could be overcome with reasonable tech advances (e.g. “rockets prohibitively expensive”, “radiation shielding”).
Let me steelman the argument a bit with this single bit of - sadly forgotten - “super cool and innovative tech”: “Underwater data center”, like project Natick (Microsoft) or the Chinese project:
Soooooo, if we will ever see something other than our current land based data centers, we will see millions of ocean data centers, before we will ever see a single commercial space data center.
Reasons:
- Delivery is super cheap (in comparison to space) at scale, thanks to the already existing wind farm infrastructure
- Weight is not an issue
- Cooling is solved
- Maintenance is not necessary, but replacement is. Easy on scale, because modular.
- No radiation shielding necessary
- Connection: data cable = no extra lag or quantity limit
Oh, and by the way, it is still not clear if even ocean data center will be viable. Just found this 😂
It will never be an economic thing. Only unpluggable skynet military thing. The weight is not an issue. though. It’s volume.
Weight is always the issue with lifting stuff into space. Volume might merely be an additional issue.
The $200/kg launch price target is based on 150 ton capacity. That’s a $30m launch costs target. Volume/foldability matters the most because that is the actual constraint that limits datacenter launch to a single NVL72 size.
Starship is huge. I dont know how tightly they can fold these expected dishes, but by weight, they can amd will do 60 starlink v3, and itd be 50 datacenter dishes equivalent. How many they can actually launch is going to depend on how well the solar and radiator folds down, so it might be a volume issue vs weight where they cant launch with the max weight capabilities of the ship.
Is this before or after we colonize mars?
