That leaves only two kinds of people left who are still talking excitedly about datacenters in space: The uninformed and the grifters.
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.
Its still very dumb because of economics, logistics, serviceability and more.
Things get cheaper.
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?
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.