Technology

Anybody Who Thinks Orbital Data Centers are a Good Idea ~~Is Suffering from AI Psychosis, Experts Argue~~ Doesn't Understand Basic Physics

Space being "cold" doesn't matter since vacuum INSULATES.

it's not even cold...! The matter that DOES exist in it is very hot plasma but it's just really thinly spread out.

Orbital data centers are a good idea if one wants to get massive golden parachutes that siphon money from all the investor cash that the entirely u realistic promises brings in. They are a grift that will most likely benefit Musk in the same way all his other pie int he sky bullshit does.

Being technically terrible hasn't really stopped that from happening with his other bullshit projects.

It's literally just taking the piss out of idiotic investors. Data Centers, AI, space, new frontier, new markets. It checks all the boxes to get idiots excited to dump money into your tech company so people keep talking about it because talking about it is what gets results. Hopefully nobody is dumb enough to actually try it, it's an absolute scam.

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.

Not saying this won't ever be a thing. But not in the lifetime of anybody on earth right now I don't think.

Yea honestly, orbital data centers are the dumbest shit I've heard during this bubble, and a huge indication of peak bubble hype.

You could put em on the moon with a heatpump into the ground.

The cost per pound to get them there is insane.

They are seriously old in 2 years.

They could put them in deserts here with closed loop cooling.

or... hear me out... Maybe we DON'T NEED THAT MUCH AI....

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.

Are there actually people who think this is a good idea that are not in a position to make money off it?

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.

They want to put them where normal people cannot damage them.

Could you imagine being in orbit during an AI datacenter kessler collapse, and just getting smoked by an rtx 5070 travelling at mach fuck?

And yet the IPO of SpaceX was justified with the presumed future success of its space-based data center program.

LOL LOL you CANNOT cool something like that in space. The entire concept is flawed.

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.

For the cost of one orbital data centre, you could probably build 10 terrestrial data centres, bribe literally everyone involved in the construction to pretend that they built it in space, buy an island, fake your death, and spend the rest of your life off-grid.

as much as underwater datacenter, extremely high cost despite the ocean being able to cooldown datacenters fast. also these large LLM have never overcome one major flaw, There is no profit generation in the industry.

If you sell rockets and satellites, then data centers in space sound like a perfect idea to increase demand with other people's money.

Orbital politicians, and billionaires are a hella cool idea though

Eliminating heat is like one of the hardest space problems 🦙

Not just experts but an 11-year-old with a mild interest in space could have explained to these techbros why this wouldn't work as an idea.

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.

I've been working on IT for quite a while now and the only certain thing on this business is that hardware breaks down. All of it. Only questions are 'when' and 'how'. I'm pretty sure you can't get NBD support to the orbit. And I'd guess that shaking the shit out of the hardware during launch won't really help.

And that's of course just a minor detail, the whole idea is so stupid on a very fundamental level that I don't know why it's even a news worthy.

It makes sense if we have a space elevator and also invert the way most of the physics of data centers work.

The advantage of datacenters in space is that the peasants can't break in and sabotage your equipment. Only a very small set of nations would have the capability of blowing it up or somehow jamming its communications.

It literally only makes sense if you're a billionaire worried about the growing unpopularity of your AI datacenters, or you're using it for war and don't want it easily bombed...