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Anybody Who Thinks Orbital Data Centers are a Good Idea Is Suffering from AI Psychosis, Experts Argue (tech.yahoo.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 4 points 2 months ago (5 children)

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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

    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 is 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.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    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 for overnight)

    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.

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