Specs: https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2064108916611420273?s=20
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.
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?