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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

The actual “plan” is to just put a couple of GPUs in each Starlink satellite for inference.

They’re not launching something the size of a building!

Which is irrelevant to SpaceX bottom line. Launching GPUs into space, whether by twos or by tons is not going to be a profitable venture.

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.

That just doesn't seem to justify anywhere near the valuation though does it?

Disclaimer: I suspect "data centers in space" is just blatant market manipulation by Elon, exactly the same as he'd done dozens of times before with self-driving, etc.

Having said that... it might justify the valuation if every other data centre build-out gets blocked by insufficient power supply.

Might.

Bear in mind that you could take the solar panels that you would have launched into orbit, use the launch costs to purchase additional solar panels, batteries, and some additional land, and build a data center plus solar farm plus grid scale battery bank on the ground for probably (almost certainly) less than the combined launch costs.

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.

shhhhhh the line WILL go up, whether you like it or not

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