this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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Putting AI datacenters in space has got to the be dumbest idea conceived by Elon yet. There has to be several dozen engineering challenges to even make that happen and when all is said and done it would make absolutely no financial sense to actually do it. This is just yet another attempt by Elon to hype up spacex for an IPO. It's a very poor attempt at that.
EDIT (1 day after initial comment): There is one angle I didn't think of yesterday but just dawned on me. Now that Twitter office was raided by authorities in France, perhaps Elon thinks he can put datacenters in space to get around the jurisdictions of countries. He might be thinking by putting datacenter in space that can beam data directly through starlink he can basically side step local law. He may think by having CSAM generating datacenters in space it can't be raided and be shut down easily by terrestrial law enforcement. Obviously this is not how law and law enforcement works but I think there is a decent chance Elon is dumb enough to think his idea would work.
yes but DNS is terrestrial, so you could just ban the web portals and apps on earth.
Yes you could VPN to a non-compliant country, but you can already do that without a spater spenter
it's getting hard to differentiate his ideas that are intentionally scams and his ideas that are just ketamine fueled insanity
You would have really liked the comedian we saw last night. Epstein files were the main topic. Sammy Obeid. Good stuff.
Isn't heat management like one of the stickiest problems in long term space travel? Bc a vacuum doesn't have anything it can transfer heat to so it can't cool down. And this guy wants to establish data centers for which heat management is also its biggest problem.
Heat dissipation was my very first thought. Musk's whole premise is absolute horseshit with modern and even near-future tech.
It's not a problem like "get heavy thing off ground", where we can study principles of lift, throw fossil fuels at rocketry, etc. There is no magic bullet for "move this massive amount of heat somewhere else"; entropy has too much to say on the subject.
Space does let you dissipate heat via radiation (just not convection or conduction). Space radiators are a well understood and often-used technology.
The problem with space data centers isn't the technology, we have the technology. It's the cost. Everything in space is orders of magnitude more expensive than terrestrially. It's simply not economically feasible to build a data center in space when you can build hundreds for the same cost on Earth.