Gotta pump that Grok IPO /s Seriously though, the whole SpaceXAI makes zero sense to me. SpaceX was a wonderful company and there was zero need to pollute it with Twitter and a service that creates sexual images of people without their consent.
Gotta pump that Grok IPO /s Seriously though, the whole SpaceXAI makes zero sense to me. SpaceX was a wonderful company and there was zero need to pollute it with Twitter and a service that creates sexual images of people without their consent.
I was initially very skeptical about the viability of space-based data centers but after a couple hours reading papers, studies and summary technical assessments I realized there are a range of credible expert viewpoints from, "pretty unlikely" to "it could actually work". There at least appear to be plausible, though unproven, solutions to the most obvious drive-by objections I had off the top of my non-expert head.
Of course, there are still a lot of unknowns, any of which could prove fatal to the concept but I'm no longer comfortable just dismissing it as "obviously ridiculous."
I think what often gets confused is people saying it isn't viable with "it is not physically possible".
It is physically possible, but it won't have positive ROI so it is not viable.
If you have a paper/post doing the calculations for positive ROI, I'd be all ears. It can even have the optimistic Elon assumptions about price of mass to orbit.
I don’t think people are confused between the two. What’s happening is that drive by objections have no real way to assess viability. That calculation you ask for has line items in it that greatly depend on engineering optimizations that, unless you work in the field, are hard to estimate accurately.
There are a lot of things that are possible that make no financial sense.
Yeah you would need 10-20 American football fields worth of radiators for a single data-center... so yes, it "can" work, but it's completely inefficient and unrealistic.
The plan is to launch a constellation of smaller AI sats not a monolithic large data center. The calculations I have seen actually have a smaller radiator area than solar panels. Scott Manley’s has a video on this where he goes into some numbers.
Scott Manley's video uses 20kw as a reference number which isn't even half of the power usage of a modern GB200 rack. I.e. not even close to the power usage of an actual datacenter. In fact, not even 1% of the power usage of a datacenter...
Also, how is a constellation of satellites any easier in this case? They all need extremely large radiators, they all need maintenance, they all need high bandwidth communication.
If you calculate the actual cooling requirements for megawatts of server, you end up with needing many, many football fields of cooling.
It's nonsensical. Sure you can make the numbers sort of work for a single server, but a single server on earth costs MUCH MUCH less to launch, maintain, etc. So why bother doing it in space? We just end up with loads of unusable space servers as they gradually breakdown and cannot be repaired.
In fact, not even 1% of the power usage of a datacenter...
Right, but SpaceX has already filed plans with the FCC to launch a million of them, which is to say, 10K of your datacenter units. Tying back to the article, this plan is definitely going to require Starship and airline-like operations.
Yeah. I don't have any doubts that this is something that can be done. But doing it cheaply enough to be worth while is the difficult bit. Elon does have reputation for delivering impressive things, but not for finishing them on the deadlines he sets.
Later in the video he runs through the changes needed for 100kw per rack.
Wow, one 100kw rack!
Dude, you realize that right now there are 100+s of data centers in construction around the world often in the 500MW to 1PW range? I.e. there are many, many datacenters (100s) in construction, right now, with 100s of MW up to multiple PW?
Scott's analysis is out by several orders of magnitude!
Everyone knows its "theoretically" possible to have a single server or a single rack in space.
The big and most obvious glaring miss is, how would it be economically viable and operationally viable to have datacenters in space which compete with datacenters on the ground.
We are experts are creating economically profitable (very profitable) datacenters on the ground, which work really well for inference and training, which are cooled really well, can be maintained easily, etc. The idea that we are going to have 100s of MW clusters or 1PW clusters in space, and they are going to be competitive economically, and we are going to be able to maintain them, and they are going to actually WORK (i.e. how will the networking be competitive with datacenters on earth), is frankly laughable.
Scott is totally talking rubbish on this.
Putting a datacentre in space may be feasible but the scale that he's suggesting is really unbelievable.
And if he's actually capable of producing solar panels in the quantity that he's talking about in the time frame that he's talking about -- why doesn't he just put them on earth to solve our growing climate change problems and fuel shortages?
Permitting/regulation issues
> but the scale that he's suggesting...
Well, yeah but that's just Elon being Elon. At this point I think even the most pro-Elon folks freely admit "The first rule of Elon is: 'Ignore everything he says about timeframes and scale.'"
Did you find a credible solution for heat dissipation in the papers you read? I fear the laws of thermodynamics will kill this project.
https://youtu.be/FlQYU3m1e80
Is a good start
Tesla has been out competed in Batteries, EV's and Robots so this is his new move. He did something similar with his solar panel company put it inside Tesla and then it has almost disappeared from the news. He puts the AI company inside of Spacex makes up a lot of unrealistic numbers to pump up price and captures most of the stock gains from Spacex IPO by diluting others people shares.
You make it sound like Tesla was a failure and he's only interested in capitalistic success, where if you've been following him for years you'd know this has been his plan all along. He built Tesla when electric cars were mocked and his plan was to push electric cars to be mainstream. To now say "Tesla has been outcompeted and so now he's doing something else [implied- to keep his power]" is to simplify and misinterpret the situation. Tesla has successfully lit a fire under the car manufacturer's world, to the point all of them started making electric cars.
He is so good at rewriting history. People buy it so much, it’s incredible. He didn’t build Tesla, Eberhard and Tarpenning did.
Don’t forget solar city. There is precedent for this, it is how Musk operates and it’s far more about protecting his investments and letting him use the company for his own enrichment than what makes sense for the company.
You forget that Musk has to make all the idiots who gave him capital for Twitter whole, somehow.