Because they're money for space projects and some billionaire wants it.

It's a shameless attempt to loop in their own assets to a free for all money spree. There is literally nothing about it that makes any sense. It would be more efficient to beam laser light back to earth to power a dc than this, and that's a stupid idea too.

Right now, it's a terribly dumb idea. Here's why:

• Getting shit to space is expensive
• Cooling those data centers would require radiative cooling. The radiators for that would have to be crazy huge.
• It's economically unviable when you can build data centers on earth.

For me, this looks exactly like the "we're going to Mars, so invest in our space company, yipeeeee" thing.

That being said, could we see space based computation in the future? Sure. Again, here's why:

• It's more to do with simple energy consumption (not just for computation, but just energy consumption in general).
• Energy consumed still stays on the planet as heat. Slowly, it radiates away to space. The speed of radiation however scales with the surface area of the planet. Meaning, there's a strict upper limit of how much "energy consumption" we can do on earth before causing crazy global warming due to this waste heat. Note this is NOT green house gas caused warming. This is caused by more heat on the planetary surface than exiting. Waste heat
• Ok, so assuming that energy consumption increases 1% per year after the "exponential phase" begins, the planet Earth ITSELF would reach its limits from the standpoint of holding industry in less than a thousand years. The exponential phase for us seems to have started since the industrial revolution. Also, our current increase of energy consumption year over year is quite above 1%. Here's the paper.
• Hence, for environmental reasons, there would come a time in human history where we have to put our industry (which includes data centers) in space. Anywhere but Earth.

Could we develop systems with crazy efficiency? Sure. Maybe. I don't know. But even if we do, I can't see a case where the Hedonic treadmill wouldn't set in, still causing crazy energy consumption.

Hence, in conclusion, boo to current space companies grifting space based data centers. But yay to eventually putting all industry off planet.

It's a terribly inneficient idea, but it sounds futuristic, which is basically what Elon trades on to acquire government subsidies and investor buy-in.

~~Cold~~ nvm I'm stupid

I feel like "data centers in spaaaaaaaace!" is an idea that could only come from someone completely removed from the day-to-day of how computers actually work. Like no matter how you slice it, these are physical objects that are going to need servicing by human beings fairly regularly. Putting them in space vastly complicates that process.

They want to see if AI can still function while getting randomised bitflips?

I believe Apartheid Pedo cited space being cold as a reason (ie don't have to worry about cooling the servers), except as usual he's a fuckwit with no idea what he's talking about. Space is empty, which means there's nothing to carry heat away, so the only way to lose heat is via radiation. And that takes forever.

This idea is a total scam. This is just a way of asking investors for an enormous amount of money, with literally no intention of actually following through with it.

They might throw a couple of cheap satellites in orbit, just to say they "did it"...but no one with any actual comprehension of these things is honestly expecting it to yield results. The vast majority of that investment money, is going to be used for unrelated things.

In any sane world, this would be considered fraud. But, here we are.

There's a whole lot of answers in here saying cooling is impossible or super hard, and that people whose literal job is building satellites haven't thought of this. Or that the people whose literal job is building satellites haven't though about all sorts of other basic stuff like "you can't do maintenance on satellites" or "there's radiation in space" or whatnot.

Yes, they've thought of all those things. Those aren't useful answers

The main advantages continuous high-power solar energy, different regulations being in play (it's "outside the regulatory environment), and in the case of SpaceX it provides synergy with their own rocket launch business. They're creating their own demand, allowing everything to be cheaper in bulk.

Yes, it's to "raise the stock value." Isn't that why companies do anything? Doing a thing that produces value is going to raise the value of the stock of the company doing it.

Solar energy is more efficient in space because there's no atmosphere and depending on the orbit can be in the sun for much, much longer than on earth over the day. Apparently you can beam the energy down to earth somehow, but you lose something like 50%. So the solution is to put the data center up where you get the power. The downside is that it costs a fuckton to send it up, cooling becomes an issue, temperature gradients become an issue, heat and cold cycles as it goes from sun to the dark side of earth is an issue, and the funnest part is that cosmic rays can fry electronics like GPUs.

Solar power and low latency laser communications.

Power is free* in space.

Communications between satellites is as fast as fast can be, fast enough that it can be faster to go earth-sat-sat-sat-earth than via fibre under the ocean.

The absolute con is that heat is really really hard to shed in space and it's really really expensive to get big heavy things to space.

As stated elsewhere it's a scam but their stated reason is because they want to build massive data centres on earth but there's a huge backlog in getting electricity for them. Even generating their own electricity is troublesome because every single natural gas/methane turbine is already spoken for years into the future and solar etc takes a lot of land which they may have trouble getting the rights to build on. Thus, if you could build in space you can theoretically collect a lot more solar and more strongly than what you get on the planet's surface. It just ignores all the other costly parts but I guess if you are being given unlimited money by venture capitalists what else are you going to promise them when they want more more more AI infrastructure

So I can actually think of a few reasons: Preprocessing vast amounts of super high resolution satellite imagery to save bandwidth, and jurisdictional black site processing data some countries would want to steal or arrest you for having or processing, particularly if you were hiding it from internal audit. You would be paying an extreme premium over ground based for ever FLOP, so, the customer base of practical customers is limited to a handful of very well funded intelligence agencies or scientific projects in very niche use cases.

Perhaps an appropriate place for the billionaires to go. Go, fly with the AI, what could go wrong?

This idea makes sense only for starlink and similar networks.

The main issue with such satelite internet is ping. It takes few milliseconds for light (transmitting data) to travel to satelite and again back to servers on earth. This communication happens quite a few times for example in case of loading a website. There are probably some usecases where companies/users would be willing to pay for such speed increase.

Polluting sky with servers could reduce latency by half. For people using fibre on earth this does not make sense. We are better off with servers on the ground.