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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

One upon a time in SF i was told that human-driven cars would be illegal, or too expensive to insure, by the end of the decade. That was last decade. The modern tech economy is all about bubbles biult and sustained by hype people. Vertical farming. Pot replacing alcohol. Blockchains replacing lawyers. The metaverse replacing everything. Sure, we are in an AI bubble but we aslo ride atop a dozen others.

AI data centers in space? In five years? Really? No fiber connections? Does any sane person actually believe this? No. But if that is what keeps the billions flowing upwards then who am I to judge.

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Not just in SF. "Journalists" love to pick up these enflated futuristic projections and run with 'em, since they sound so cozy and generate clicks. I still remember the "Google Car" craze from the early 2010er years. And if you tell people who read and believe this futuristic nonesense that it is enflated, you get pushback, because, yeah, why should a single person know better then a incentivized journalist...

I'm quite skeptical of the data centers in space claim, but I think a proof of concept can certainly be achieved in five years. I'm less convinced that we'll ever see widescale deployment of data center satellites.

And to be fair, I've read that Google's timelines for this project extend far beyond a 5 year horizon. I think it's a rational research direction for them, since it gets people excited and historically many space-related innovations have been repurposed to benefit other industries. Best case scenario would be that research done in support of this data centers in space project leads to innovations that can be applied towards normal data centers.

Do data centers on Earth have no employees present, and none who ever come on site for the life of the data center? Prove that out on earth and I will start to believe your space data center.

I'm quite sure that can be done, if you jack up the price and pare down requirements enough. The question is, would the result be useful.

Someone can build a server in space, pairing a puny underpowered rack with a handful of servers to a ginormous football field sized solar panel plus a heat radiator plus a heavy as hell insulated battery to survive being a planet shade every hour for tens of minutes. We can do that from existing components and launch on existing rockets, no problem.

Why though?

Why would anyone need a server in space in the first place? What is a benefit for that location, necessitating a cost an order of magnitude higher (or more) compared to a warehouse anywhere on the planet?

Try asking for a 24/7 multi-gig data connection to a space server. Space suddenly doesnt seem so big once you start playing around with RF allocations.

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