18
Are datacenters in space more lucrative than on earth?
(sh.itjust.works)
No, it's a stupid idea through and through.
- heat (dissipation)
- power
- network bandwidth
- cosmic rays (shielding)
- part failures (with so many parts, there’s always something broken
- eol parts (lifecycling in 3-5 yrs avg)
They are all challenges that can be overcome. But at what cost. Consensus is that economically it seems hilariously unviable. Datacenters tend to have to make their money back within about 3 years. The 3 year make money back issue is also why I believe the AI DC buildout is such a high risk gamble/bubble. In a year or two, all that hardware they made a year ago will need to be replaced. You just redo the whole investment again…
Nah, man. I have an issue with your wording. You have not been "hearing a lot of talk". You are quoting one specific lie of a prolific grifter.
Nobody in their right mind agrees with this. If you had put your question as "Elon Musk, owner of a satellite launching company, as well as several money burning pits, wants others to pay him to put some of those money burners into orbit. Is there any sense to this?", the answer would be trivial.
Absolutely. Data centers on earth are subject to the laws of physics. Data centers in space, per SpaceX's white paper on the subject, operate beyond paltry thermodynamics, material sciences, and several other fields of science. When you're that much of an IPO boosting gigachadalphabro it's all profit.
Everyone knows physics doesn't exist in outer space. If it did, there would be gravity.
Nobody can hear you lying in space.
heat dissipation on satellites is a cataclysmic showstopper, but even if it was solved, anything on a satellite has to survive launch, is nonrepairable and all of that expensive silicon burns down in a couple of years
"datacenters in space" story is a result of highly advanced reasoning: 1. musk has space launch company 2. musk has ai ~~company~~ cash furnace 3. musk wants more money and 4. for what i assume are completely rational reasons and not speculation fueled by cultists, ai stocks pumped and only started crashing recently
and before that, you're gonna take a real hard look on whether regular ai datacenters on ground are profitable (they're cash furnaces)
It's an idea used to justify merging xAI (burning through cash) and SpaceX (more profitable*). It's not remotely practical due to heat dissipation, general complexity, additional cost, and complete inability to service broken components.
What they don't show in a lot of SciFi is the mundane day-to-day stuff (AFAIK, the only shows that came close were Red Dwarf and Firefly.)
Problem is, things break. Connectors come loose. Temperature makes things brittle. Small debris cross pads and create shorts. Most automated manufacturing lines can catch assembly problems, but none have 0% failure rate. This is what post-deployment maintenance is for. Somebody shows up in a van with a bunch of test gear and replacement parts. They diagnose the problem, swap out a cable or board, and the business keeps humming.
Add IoT and fancy telemetry. Monitor sensors and run ML to do predictive analytics. It still requires someone in a cargo van with a bunch of spare parts.
If you put an installation in a remote location, under water, or in space, there are benefits. But you just multiplied the cost of basic maintenance. You can build in redundancies, but a small glitch at a single-point-of-failure could cascade to a catastrophe.
Microsoft and Google tried putting data-centers under water, and after years of trials they nixed it because of these issues. Multiply that for something far out in space.
Only alternative is to build failure into the business model. Something breaks, you just leave it to rot (or burn in the atmosphere) and send another container out. Maybe the finance math works out, but it sure is wasteful.
tl:dr: SciFi is fantasy. A clogged toilet is reality.
Don't disagree with your main point at all, just want to throw The Expanse into your list for shows that do a good job of showing things just break and it's catastrophic when they do it in space.
Well, no, because generally things that don't work at all don't make money.
You've been hearing the marketing hype of a Nazi space company CEO trying to prop up his company's stock price so he can unload his rotten shares.
Fuck no. They're a stupid, terrible idea peddled by psychotic grifters.
Even the "energy generation benefit" is dubious. The solar panels in space might be more efficient, but if you consider the cost of transportation, installation and maintenance... It won't add up. You could just build more panels on earth and get similar results (still much cheaper). It's not like we are running low on space on earth.
Methinks the reason techbros want to put compute in space is to have it physically away from people. Normal data centers are right there to be smashed and torched in the event of widespread societal unrest. In space, it's unreachable.
if they want to spend billions mroe to just send 1 datacenter, they are free to do so.
They shouldn't be.
Space, especially LEO, is cluttered with way the hell too much garbage already.
Nobody should be allowed to put garbage up there for no benefit beyond CEO pocket lining.
Every single space mission should be carefully considered as a resource usage. Every object left behind in orbit should be scrutinized ten times as closely.
They’re good for people selling rocket launches.
It seemed to work for Arasaka so 🤷♂️
Yeah its a pipe dream told by people that have not thought it through and people selling to investors by telling lies for investment dollars.
It's about avoiding taxes and regulations
My understanding is that computers in space need to have redundancies in the hardware design because bit flips are a lot more common. Radiation and whatnot. Regardless, you can't just shove some parts in a case and expect it to work. At least not for very long.
I, personally, would just really appreciate it if we could stop by blocking our view of the sky/solar system with so much future garbage.
The only possible upside is that kessler syndrome will not only wipe out the internet, but it'll trap these techofascists on the ground with us (or bring about the return of blimps when the first of their bunkers is overrun by civilians pumping raw sewage into it.)
It would be astronomically expensive, wasteful, and expensive (yes twice).
Got a server rack damaged? Are the IT going up to fix it or astronauts? What kind of training would there need to be? What about upgrades? What about waste or recycling of old equipment? Do you just eject out into space wasting all the precious resources??
It's a completely stupid thought that they hoped sounded cool, but it's not really beneficial in any way
Scott Manley did a video that went through the numbers and formulae to calculate how cooling works for these sorts of satellites. Unsurprisingly, the professional satellite designers who think this is a reasonable thing appear to be correct about it.
There's a lot of misinformation circulating about how it's impossible to cool things effectively in space, but it's really not a complicated or new field. I think people mostly just want it to not work and stop there.
No — makes absolutely no sense what so ever
Unless you're a lawyer or a tax accountant.
its expensive, like how they suggested the ocean as well.
No
i prefer that we create giant mecha robots that then forever juggle data-centers always twirling, twirling, twirling them towards profitability.
only japan has shown interest in making large mechs.
It's about being outside of any company's jurisdiction. Same thing for the floating datacenters at sea. Can't tax it and regulate it if it's not in any legal country.
It's definitely a harder technical problem than regular buildings, but it's not absurd. I think the biggest risk factor is the disposition of the hardware after a life cycle: deorbiting and vaporizing tons of servers would be pretty bad, but dropping them to the surface somehow for reclamation and recycling is possible.
Nobody that says the answer is obvious has put enough expertise and thought into it. In my experience, a bunch of qualified engineers saying "well, I guess we could, maybe 🤔" is an incubator for innovation.
Orbital data centers, part 1: There’s no way this is economically viable, right? - Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/03/orbital-data-centers-part-1-theres-no-way-this-is-economically-viable-right/
Something tells me you are not an engineer...
That's a nice ad hominem you've got there.
Are you?
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
18 points (76.5% liked)
No Stupid Questions
49192 readers
877 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS