Anthropic is either taking this space business more serious than the general public, or posting this sentence was part of the deal to get the compute.
There is no doubt that it's not a serious idea.
That claim seems reasonable. I have zero knowledge of the economics of launching and maintaining satellites though.
That leaves only two kinds of people left who are still talking excitedly about datacenters in space: The uninformed and the grifters.
Its still very dumb because of economics, logistics, serviceability and more.
Things get cheaper.
And SpaceX already proven they can launch sort of datacenters 10k times by launching Starlink (up to 20KW of solar each IIRC).
FWIW Musk should support Bernie Sanders more. Putting moratoriums on datacenters would make space based ones far more economical.
It's not that you can't put a server in space, but the costs to do it almost assuredly don't make any sense. Because, if you can do it in space you can do it easier on the ground and save yourself millions in launch cost and extra complexity. Your cooling challenges are way cheaper and simpler in an atmosphere.
There's nothing much being in space really gets you, other than it makes it harder for a government to take your computers away. Not impossible, just harder.
There’s very little research work needed to make this happen; it’s all about engineering some satellite buses and having them fly in close formation to get a “data center”. And this group of satellites in sun-synchronous orbit would relay to a comms constellation e.g. starlink itself) and operate as a global scale data center. The heat management and orbital mechanics are all straight forward really.
The space data center hypothesis relies on compute supply growing faster than power supply. (Both are bottlenecked on parts of the supply chain that will take ages to scale.)
Even if you believe that's the case, the point at which orbital data centers start making sense is incredibly sensitive to the exact growth rates.
The economics are vastly different when opex is near zero for these things
H100 rental prices are still as high as when the cards were brand new. The prices vastly exceed the power costs.
In a world where power or DC permits are the current bottleneck those H100s would be getting retired in favor of Blackwells. But they aren't. They are instead being locked in for years long contracts.
If silicon were relatively abundant and power/DC space scarce, you'd get an order of magnitude more bang for the Watt by replacing the H100s with newer GPUs.
But nobody is doing that. Blackwells are being installed as additional capacity, not Hopper replacements.
So it is pretty clear that silicon is the primary bottleneck.
That said eventually they can be lifted to higher orbits and have robots deliver and swap updated compute (if not made in space itself!).
AI calcs may handle wrong calculations better than cpus where software will tend to panic.
Are we overloading the term "datacenter"? Or is it not overloaded but somehow able to achieve datacenter-like speeds / (tail) latency even when distributed across satellites?
LEO is high risk and star link satellites deorbit or burn up all the time. Not good from a capex POV on graphics cards.
How much power do starlink sats draw and how does it compare to say 8x H200s?
27,500 satellites need launching - fast! - just for Claude to meet a demand spike?
So clearly not a problem for them.
Related, US readers should call their reps and ask them to support a successor to EPRA, the Energy Permitting Reform Act, the vast majority of the generation that’s waiting for approval is from clean energy sources. It nearly got over the line before the last Congress ended, and it’s one of the most impactful things we can do to combat climate change, combined with electrifying various carbon intensive activities.
This is a self defeating argument. Neither can space!
Any scenario in which you can get data centers and power into orbit is easier on land.
And the hardest part of my home solar install, by far, was the counterparties (inspectors, power company, and subcontractors). My understanding is that it's much worse when you're trying to get a grid scale install online, the interconnection queue is currently years long. This avoids most counterparties except the ones they're already routinely dealing with.
All that gets you 70kW of cooling. Radiating to vacuum isn't very efficient.
Physics still gets a say.
Not efficient, and it doesn’t have to be, because the cooling system has 0 opex cost. And capex clearly can be made to wor
Why are we not building it on land again in some abandoned mall's parking lot?
When people say 'running it hot is bad for reliability', they mean 'running it hot and then brining it back to room temp from time to time will eventually kill it'.
The economics don't work unless Starship is doing flights in quantity, and it has met or exceeded its cost targets.
Roughly, a single rack plus solar to power it in the $15m+ range just to launch. (This assumes power dissipation is handled via some means that does not require launch to orbit. Also does not include batteries.) Choose your own hardware for the rack, but call it < $5m.
SpaceX earning $15m every time someone launches a $5m rack would be a great business for SpaceX.
Use your own calculator/LLM, but mine is suggesting that the ~$7B Colossus 1 data center in TFA would be around $50B if launched on Falcon 9 (still ignoring cooling and batteries).
(There are obviously a lot of other asterisks. I'm ignoring power storage and heat dissipation. Maintenance probably doesn't matter given 75% of cost is in the launch. Network bandwidth could be a problem considering how DCs are used. Competition - if Company A spends $100B for $25B of actual AI infra, how competitive will they be against Company B who gets $100B for their $100B by spending it in Canada or Mexico, which they can do right now? Etc.)
None of this works without Starship, which has not set a date for its first LEO insertion test yet. Yet the whole point of orbital DCs is nothing on the ground can move fast enough, hence the rush to orbit...which can't really move at all right now.
No, it doesn't make any sense.
I suppose if you are desperate to justify a large investment this what you would do - frame the story in a particular way.
Once computer constraints ease up, you will see much larger models. The reason LLM seems to have stalled a bit is because there just not enough compute.
You have more people using AI which requires more compute, and you want to build larger models which requires more compute and you have limited compute. What do you do?
" The reason LLM seems to have stalled a bit is because there just not enough compute."
lol okay mate.
and yet now we have far bigger rooms with far bigger computers anyway
Hardware may improve exponentially, but demand for compute increases double-exponentially. we'll always need more, bigger computers
There is literally not enough compute dude. If we had infinite compute we would see everyone building Mythos size models.
"Right.. and computers were once the size of a large room vs now fit into a pocket."
Yeah because we offload much of the compute to off device. You think we would have these small computers in our pockets if the internet didn't exist?
This 100%
I assume privately they may not share that opinion, but it’s not in Anthropic’s interest to talk about this (very little to gain, and may ruffle a lot of feathers if they say the wrong thing).
If you're someone with a lot of money, who dislikes governments meddling in your business, and often pisses off governments...
... oh, I see why this is an Elon talking point now.
If it happens it happens, if not, it doesn't.
This is stupid. I don't understand what's happening... specifically, what mental virus is spreading that lowers everybody's IQ by 10-20 points, evidently including my own. Put the data centers in the ocean, powered by solar and networked with Starlink or LEO. Put them in the desert. Put them 20 miles south of Nowhere, Idaho.
But space?!
Elon claims (which I take with a huge grain of salt because he's made endless broken promises in investor calls and interviews) that he disagrees with the administration's stance on solar and would use it to power his DCs if he could, but contends that permitting is a huge problem.
The US needs to figure out how to build again.
> This is stupid. I don't understand what's happening... specifically, what mental virus
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes"
And you don't need permits in international waters, any more than you need them in orbit. Lease space on container ships.
If the DC is for training or text inference, latency seems irrelevant, so go where you can quickly plop down power.
It's fraught to make a DC for a single purpose because it reduces the value of the DC. A DC that serves multiple purposes can handle other workloads. Moreover even if inference is slow, latency does still matter, and it costs quite a bit to light up net capacity (you still have to run fiber to an interconnect and depending on how far you are, this can get expensive fast.)
Supposedly some of the behind the meter gas turbines that have been getting installed are rated for a ten year service life. The DCs are burning them out in 10 months from rapid cycling. If they are willing to treat $10-100 million generators as disposable, cost seems irrelevant.
All it says is expressed interest.
That's like asking a casual how are you...
I want to be clear, I do think that one day something like that will exist, I just don't think it's anywhere close to being a reality, much like FSD.
Also it costs them, almost [0], nothing to say it and then later come up with some reason why they are no longer interested.
[0] Maybe a little bit of respect
You honestly expect this trajectory to continue unabated?
Knowing humanity's history, yes. Not sure we're ever going to see a second French Revolution. People are pacified and are not rioting. And they really should. Most of us are kind of privileged. I know people out there who are barely holding on and the recent fuel + food price increases might push them over the edge to actual poverty.
I'm just a software engineer, all I need to know is SpaceX is aggressively pursuing this - that's enough for me to believe it's viable
SpaceX operates literally orders of magnitudes more satellites than anyone else. If anybody understands the physics and engineering of space compute, it's SpaceX. Lay people debating this online is just showing their ignorance as far as I'm concerned, and it mostly comes from an emotional place of wanting Musk enterprises to fail