How long will you have to wait for the spacex claims to become "not too far off now"?
They can stop building out their capacity there, if they want.
Specs: https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2064108916611420273?s=20
He knew it was bullshit. He's dumber than most people realize, but he's not dumb enough to actually believe all the bullshit he spouts.
I don't get the slow roll on this thing. The stations in LA and SF are gonna end up sort of like Tokyo station for the Shinkansen. A giant mall area with a huge amount of commerce. Why isn't this thing done yesterday?
Land rights. Environmental reviews. Various suits attempting to exert extra compensations for tangential (at best) issues. Basically the California around.
CA HSR is slow partly because the state government has limited funds and giving out slowly. The federal government should have been contributing more. The other problem is it kept getting delayed from legal issues, mainly from acquiring land. Going forward is bad because they decided to do the easy part first and leave the hard tunnels for later.
The cost of the HSR is tiny and inconsequential. For the 40 million residents of California it amounts to about $20 a month over the 10 years the fund has been going. It hasn't even spent 50% of the total fund yet. If construction was even 2x the current rate we would already have the central valley done. So I know they are slow rolling it. That's my point. They can speed things up even just a little.
Vacuum trains are what high altitude airliners are.
Wat? Are you talking about NACS? If so, a minority of non-Tesla EVs currently on the road use it in the US, and AFAIK zero outside of North America.
And even in the US, the vast majority of EV charging stations are AC and use J1772, a SAE standard that predates Tesla's existence.
The state government of California was doing a bang up job of destroying this project on their own. He didn't really need to help them. Moreover given the rise of remote work I'm not sure it has as much value as it would have had it been constructed when it was designed.
> but he's not dumb enough to actually believe all the bullshit he spouts.
Yet he's not afraid of the consequences either. This seems more telling to me.
He lies every day about his companies, and no one ever does a thing about it.
DOGE killed a few hundred thousand children for no reason at all; it didn't even save money. He did it purely for the joy of killing black and brown children in the global south. No one with any power to deliver has ever suggested he should face consequences for it.
Why should he be afraid of consequences? There will never be any for him, as long as he is protected by unimaginable wealth and a power structure designed around serving those with wealth.
Nobody talks about it, but my pet theory is that Trunk attacked Iran because he wanted to do it in his first terms but was stopped by his inner circle. THE Trump. Stopped. Of course he loved the idea of attacking Iran when presented to him earlier this year.
People tend to think that the powerful and rich are so much more clever than normal people so they come up with complex hidden agendas, but I didn't find it necessarily being the case.
Whether he was the only reason for high speed rail being derailed and delayed isn't really the point. He intentionally worked against mass transit, and lied repeatedly about hyperloop as part of that.
Some people really should just rm -rf their boot disk cause I feel dumber for having read their comment.
With the space data centers, it’s more, “Okay yeah so let’s say you do…why?”
It just seems like a really hard thing to do when the available options are, like, the Chinese building data centers on the Tibetan plateau where it is cold, ample renewable energy, tons of land, and, like, oxygen.
Orbit is a bad place for a datacenter. Your equipment will be hot and bombarded with radiation. You can't do any repairs. Even with reusable rockets you still have to pay for fuel to launch everything into orbit. You get a small benefit of more efficient power generation but it's not worth all the downsides.
If you want to have solar-powered AI datacenter that you can't service, you'd be way better off building the power generation in a coastal desert and building your datacenter underwater.
If Starlink didn't exist, then it could make sense to put edge data centers in orbit. But Starlink means can put edge computing everywhere on the ground.
What could that 1,000 tonnes per year get your in terms of sell-able data center capacity, and how does that compare to terrestrial build-out time frames?
Radiating into 300K ambient, it’s 134C. (300K ambient is about what you get if the sun is visible or if a large fraction of what the radiator can see is the Earth.)
You can slightly fudge the 300K case with a spatially or specially selective system, which would add weight and complexity. (Well, you can’t get rid of the problem of the Earth being warm by spectral selectivity — it’s the same spectrum as the radiator.) You cannot fudge the absolute zero case — the Stefan-Boltzmann law is extremely unforgiving. [0] And you need some headroom for the system that gets the cooling fluid to the radiator.
The thermal qualification temperature of an H100 is 87C and the associated HBM is 95C.
So I don’t see how this can work short of using higher-temp chips. I have no idea how SpaceX expects to source any such thing in any meaningful volume.
[0] This includes heat pumps. A heat pump makes it worse.
On the flip side of all this, the Starlink satellites work, and I would expect SpaceX to have some idea what they’re doing. Starlink satellites have largish power systems (smaller than these proposed AI satellites, but not outrageously so). They presumably turn a smaller fraction of their power into low-temperature heat: the ion thrusters and the various transmitters emit a good deal of non-thermal power. A good fraction of Starlink’s electronics way well function at rather higher junction temperatures than 100C. And I imagine that Starlink satellites are economical to operate at an average of much less than 100% power. So I don’t really know what’s going on. It’s plausible that Starlink gets away with a cooling system that’s not so great for a compute satellite.
If you build one data center on earth, you did just that.
If you build one in space and make it work and cost effective, you can scale infinitely (which is why SpaceX is uniquely positioned), until you hit the next bottleneck (which is why Tesla is building a fab).
Tangential: If you play Factorio or Satisfactory, this is _all_ you do. Removing bottlenecks.
"If we can just keep consuming massive amounts of capital, at some point, we'll turn a profit. Maybe even a big one."
It's not 2019 anymore, but this mindset acts like it still is.
SpaceX, along with its wanna-IPO classmates OpenAI and Anthropic, are going public because there's basically no more private investor money left and there's no political will (outside of whatever the hell is going on in Donald Trump's head) to lower interest rates to what they were in the golden age of blitzscaling.
They have to ask the public for more money. They just don't have enough humility to do it on decent terms, as evidenced by the IPO deals they're floating.
If this fails to produce what you're talking about - which is likely given things like "speed of radio transmissions", "thermal conductivity in a vacuum" and other things governed by those pesky laws of physics - the game's over.
Satellites are really expensive and electricity on the surface is relatively cheap. What hypothetical prospective customers are willing to pay the necessary rates? I understand that bandwidth back to the surface is expensive but are we really expecting so much raw data to be trapped in space that it justifies sending computers into orbit in order to crunch it at the source?
So how do you remove megawatts of heat in 0K?
IMO, that lines up with a weird remark from Musk around stealth jet obsolescence few years ago, and makes sense.
It’s the exact tactic he used with California HSR
They’re not launching something the size of a building!
Having said that... it might justify the valuation if every other data centre build-out gets blocked by insufficient power supply.
Might.
I think the only way compute in space works out financially is if there's so much bulk data already up there that downlink bandwidth becomes a serious bottleneck.
It's just a wildly expensive bad idea, and it is obvious to anyone that understands how much it costs to put things in space. A man who runs a rocket company knows how much it costs. He knows it's dumb as hell. But, he also knows the average investor is even dumber, because TSLA still trades at ~357 PE.
Ok. And why does it follow from this that the physics of an orbital data center makes no sense?
The construction of the building w/ zoning and the political fights and utilities arguments and years of time and whatever is what is being dealt with by putting it in orbit.
And then when you build on the ground you could even send people to it to swap hard drives and GPUs when they inevitably fail or upgrade them to keep them current. At lower rates of failure than they would in space because we have a planetary magnetosphere protecting us from cosmic rays.
It implies that China, which can cut through much red tape and has great (and improving) utilities and infrastructure, lots of energy, can just build normal datacenters and save the cost of dozens of space flights.
That's assuming he can get launches down to $10 million which I'm sure will be right behind his flying roadster and cybertruck boat
[1] https://www.globaldatacenterhub.com/p/can-elon-musks-7b-colo...
A very large 1,000,000 sqft data centre is therefore $100 million.
Still not going to be cheaper, but if you get moderately optimistic it's cheap enough to maayyyybe start looking like a source of demand for starship if you can find suckers (government) to pay 10x the price per compute.
Even if you pay a bit more to position them in a higher, more stable orbit, you still can’t physically get to them to repurpose equipment.
Check this datacenter gadget out:
https://www.marvell.com/blogs/sustainable-computing-with-cxl...
That trick is a complete nonstarter if the modules you’re trying to reuse are in space.