Seems to me that maintenance would be significant.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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I skimmed the title for a sec and thought "what's wrong with orbital stations?" before realizing the utter stupidity that graced my vision.
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SpaceX IPO happened to keep xAi afloat.
Servers in space topic exist because of this very reason.
It is a non subject
Just billionaire psychosis like where ai got to where it is to begin with. Obviously they’re all visionaries leading the world to a better place…
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Or they are just ignorant of how heat dissipation and vacuums work.
Sadly the latency involved in transmitting and receiving from orbit makes many terrestrial applications fail... The speed of light is a fixed constant.
When gaming, we can always see the idiots running on starlink...the lag is visible and makes them sitting ducks.. ;-)
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Ignoring all of the disadvantages of datacenters in space, what are any of the advantages?
Shit-tons of profit, if you happen to own a company that specializes in rocket launches.
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At medium earth orbit the minimum delay will be about 67ms (250 ms to 600+ ms for geostationary orbits) for LEO it is 25-50 ms. The average ground network ping on a good day is 1ms-20ms.
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If they build a data center on land and an identical one floating on the ocean, what is the difference in how much heat they emit when I throw thermite grenades at them?
At least their water consumption would do down. Let's do it, shoot the tech bros up there with them. Let's even overshoot the orbit and make them disappear in the darkness.
Water consumption has been way overblown. Sure if you're in the Colorado River basin, water is absolutely an issue. But if your concerned with wasted water usage, all data centers combined would be a rounding error compared to what we throw away on turf grass.
Kyle Hill and Hank Green have both made videos about this I'm not crazy.
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don't need to think much about this crackpot idea.
where would the heat dissipate? that just ends this topic.
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I’m far more concerned with the suggested floating datacenters. Just dumping more waste heat into the ocean. WCGW.
You wildly underestimate the size of the oceans. If they're going to be built anyway, and if they can have a long lifespan even in salt water, this would be far better for the environment than the currently popular method of using rivers for cooling - rivers can be warmed by perceptible and significant amounts until they carry that extra heat into the oceans, plus fresh water is more rare, precious, and in need of protection than salt water.
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Do we have a way to transfer heat into rock, because I'm thinking lunar data centers.
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Imagine launching that scale of infrastructure, loaded full of Nvidia chips that'll be outdated in like 2 years.
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The article you posted from Futurism(Via Yahoo News) reference a YouTube video as it's source which is in itself is a follow up to IEEE Spectrum article.
I believe watching the original video or reading the actual article will provide a better value.
At minimum how would the heat be managed? Also as someone else said, just getting the material from the earth into orbit is currently possible but why?
An average PC with 8GB of RAM will have around 4 bit-flips per year because of cosmic rays. When you remove the wonderful protective atmosphere that number is so greatly increased that they have to use older chips, encased in a shield for any computer system that is launched into space. Explain to me how you are supposed to have stability with 100 000 5nm process chips constantly be hit by cosmic rays? The answer is a shitload of lead or steel or concrete. It is fucking unrealistic to send that much shielding material into orbit. Option B is getting the equivalent compute with 50nm process space hardened chips into orbit, which is also unrealistic because of the shear amount of chips required to have a useful data center.
Anyone who immediately does not shut down the idea of orbital data centers should not be in the field of tech, and especially should not be the Csuite of a tech company. I can't belive anyone even humors the idea, it's a fucking joke.
Making everything run ontop of an LLM was not non deterministic enough. Now with the power of cosmic rays we can guarantee the most non deterministic system possible. With such an unknown state we may finally achieve garbage in sometimes not garbage out compute. Invest in typewriters and monkeys today and you could be a partial owner of the entire works of Shakespeare soon(tm).
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I think they're a great idea. They don't use land, don't continuously use water, and don't pollute our land and waterways. And, as an added bonus, they're extremely expensive and a money-pit.
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