[HN Gopher] Data centers in space makes no sense
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Data centers in space makes no sense
Author : ajyoon
Score : 50 points
Date : 2026-02-03 19:37 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (civai.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (civai.org)
| Bender wrote:
| AI data-centers use upwards of 100MW. The biggest solar panels in
| space could produce around 240KW. When they speak of AI data-
| centers in space what do they actually mean in realistic non
| theoretical terms and where are the materials for this coming
| from?
|
| If the AI data-center used only 10MW then each could have two
| redundant SMR's assuming the cooling challenges have been worked
| out but then we could have nuclear reactor disposal and collision
| issues.
| shetaye wrote:
| I assume the idea is to have the entire constellation be the
| data center in question. Laser back haul transceiver bandwidth
| is in the same order of magnitude of rack-to-rack bandwidths
| [1][2]. I could see each sat being a rack and the entire mesh
| being a cluster.
|
| [1] https://hackaday.com/2024/02/05/starlinks-inter-satellite-
| la... (and this is two years ago!) [2]
| https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-accelerated-networking-re...
| Starman_Jones wrote:
| Very confused by this plan. Data centers on Earth are struggling
| with how to get rid of waste heat. It's really, really hard to
| get rid of waste heat in space. That seems to be about the worst
| possible place to put a data center.
| palmotea wrote:
| That's not Elon's problem. He's an ideas guy. Data centers in
| space is definitely an idea.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Indeed. I would go so far as to assert that, of all the ideas
| that have ever been proposed in the history of humanity, data
| centres in space is most certainly one of them.
| Keyframe wrote:
| _Very confused by this plan._
|
| How about now? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3ex92557jo
| general1465 wrote:
| Well this explains why, but does not answer how to get rid of
| excessive heat in space.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's a distraction as they suck out as much value from Tesla as
| possible before the music stops and they go bust. There are a
| few really big IPOs this year including SpaceX, which will
| likely trigger significant market volatility.
| general1465 wrote:
| Well the issue is that a lot of people believe that space is
| cold. If you will ask Google/Gemini what is a temperature of
| space, it will tell you:
|
| _The average temperature of deep space is approximately
| -270.45degC or 2.73 Kelvin), which is just above absolute zero.
| This baseline temperature is set by the Cosmic Microwave
| Background (CMB) radiatio..._
|
| Which is absolute nonsense, because vacuum has no temperature.
| izzydata wrote:
| How about we just make a giant heatsink that reaches into space
| instead. Then we can cool the whole planet. Coming up with crazy
| ideas is cheap, but the logistics are obviously impractical.
| 0x53 wrote:
| Look into radiative cooling. Basically this, but more
| practical. Several companies working on it:
| https://www.skycoolsystems.com/
| grim_io wrote:
| I don't quite believe this.
|
| Is it really better than just using solar panels to run a
| heat pump?
| RobotToaster wrote:
| It possibly makes sense if you're preparing for war, harder to
| hit, harder to physically break into, beyond the range of nuclear
| EMP, and accessible from anywhere on earth.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also be
| able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into LEO to
| wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO. At least on
| Earth data centers in theory can be hidden and physically
| hardened. In orbit, even a crude rocket able to reach that
| plane can become a weapon of mass satellite destruction. Even
| if those orbits clear out in four or five years, by then
| whatever ugliness is going on down on the surface of Earth will
| likely have resolved one way or the other. Starlink is a great
| military asset for a superpower pushing around smaller states
| in ways that aren't an existential threat to them. In a real
| conflict, it's a fragile target beyond the strike capacities of
| much of the developing world but easily destroyed by any
| moderate level industrial nation.
| philipkglass wrote:
| _Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also
| be able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into
| LEO to wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO._
|
| South Africa built nuclear weapons in the 1980s:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_ma.
| ..
|
| But it never had an orbital launch capability.
|
| Pakistan doesn't have a domestic orbital launch capability
| but it does have nuclear weapons.
|
| Surprisingly, the United Kingdom doesn't have a domestic
| orbital launch capability at present though it has had
| ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons for many decades.
|
| At present, I would say that building a basic implosion-
| assembled atomic bomb is easier than building a rocket system
| that reach low Earth orbit. It's a lot easier to build a bomb
| now than it was in the 1940s. The main thing that prevents
| wider nuclear weapon proliferation is treaties and
| inspections, not inherent technical difficulties.
| proggy wrote:
| Satellites. Are. Fragile. People really don't seem to
| intuitively understand this. Earth based assets are orders of
| magnitude more difficult to attack simply by virtue of being
| able to be placed inside of fortified structures anchored to,
| or inside of, the ground. The cost to deploy hardened
| buildings at scale is peanuts compared to orbiting
| constellations.
| general1465 wrote:
| You don't need EMP for that. Few ASAT missiles will start the
| avalanche and turn orbits around Earth into shooting range.
| Good luck talking to your satellites with shredded antennas and
| solar panels.
| shishcat wrote:
| how much latency would a minecraft server in space have?
| wmf wrote:
| With live migration it could be quite low, like 10 ms.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| What's there not to like? Superconductors. Free electricity. No
| cooling necessary.
|
| Put those three together and _maybe_ it's possible to push
| physics to its limits. Faster networking, maybe 4x-5x capacity
| per unit compared to earth. Servicing is a pain, might be cheaper
| to just replace the hardware when a node goes bad.
|
| But it mainly makes sense to those who have the capability and
| can do it cheaply (compared to the rest). There's only one
| company that I can think of and that is SpaceX. They are closing
| in on (or passed) 8,000 satellites. Vertical integration means
| their cost-base will always be less than any competitor.
| DougN7 wrote:
| Why is there no cooling necessary?
| sheepscreek wrote:
| Space is cold - 4 K. Superconductors.
| grim_io wrote:
| Repeating the word "superconductor" does not convince
| anyone of anything.
| pgalvin wrote:
| Do you mean to suggest that computer hardware does not need to
| be cooled when it is in space? Or that it is trivial and easier
| to do this in space compared to on Earth? I don't understand
| either claim, if so.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| Superconductors. Average temperature in space is around 4 K.
| cyberax wrote:
| Even assuming that this la-la-land idea has merit, the
| equilibrium temperature at the Earth's orbit is 250 Kelvin
| (around -20C). The space around the Earth is _hot_.
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| > No cooling necessary.
|
| This is false, it's hard to cool things in space. Space
| (vacuum) is a very good insulator.
|
| 3 are ways to cool things (lose energy): -
| Conduction - Convection - Radiation
|
| In space, only radiation works, and it's the least efficient of
| those 3 options.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| Superconductors.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Magnets.
|
| (We're just saying random physics things right?)
| tenuousemphasis wrote:
| Your exuberance for this topic is only matched by your lack of
| understanding about it.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Do you know the lifespan of those satellites? Do you know how
| many of those fall out (sorry, de-orbited) of space every year?
|
| Do you know the cost of sending up a payload of them?
|
| Do you know how much $$ you need to extract from those payloads
| to make the cost of sending them up make sense?
|
| Do you know how much they've lied about Starlink revenue and
| subscription counts?
| antonymoose wrote:
| To Steelman the topic, Musk's whole alleged mission is to make
| humans a multi-planet species that can survive an earth killing
| event.
|
| To that end, a small data center space isn't about unit-
| economics, it's a bigger mission. So the question we should
| consider is what can we put into space the further that mission.
| Can we put a meaningful sum of human knowledge out there for
| preservation? It sounds like "yes," even if we can't train
| ChatGPT models out there yet.
| redwood wrote:
| Sure but you could do that with a simple disc in space
| mongol wrote:
| Actually, the data centers can be the discs. As long as the
| data centers can crunch on, we don't need to stay alive here
| on earth
| awakeasleep wrote:
| When I was a kid, I had to go to CCD, a religious after school
| program for Catholics.
|
| The whole time I was there it was a mental game of trying to
| steel man the contradictory or incoherent stuff, using my brain
| power to try and rewrite things to make sense.
|
| After some years, I woke up and realized that's what I was
| doing, and even if I could do it in my mind, that didn't make
| the source material rational.
|
| Heres hoping you have a similar moment.
| antonymoose wrote:
| > Heres hoping you have a similar moment.
|
| I do not politically align with Musk. I've always thought
| Tesla was important in popularizing electric cars while being
| a low-quality built product with repair and supply chain
| issues. I think The Boring Company is a joke. Twitter was a
| power-grab.
|
| I also think SpaceX is societally beneficial, a good means to
| shake-up a stagnant industry and a humanity-wide area of
| interest.
|
| If you think I'm a member of a religious cult, I respectfully
| suggest you evaluate what led You to believe that itself.
| mongol wrote:
| Let's say there is an earth killing event, and let's say there
| is an outpost on Mars with some people on it. How much does it
| really matter that some humans survive, in light of the
| enormous catastrohophe that killed all life on earth? Is it a
| very worthwhile objective for our species to persist a while
| longer, or should we not just accept that also life itself will
| will die out on geological or astronomical time scales?
| antonymoose wrote:
| I would suppose there is a gap we face between true species-
| wide survival capability and where we sit today. I have no
| true idea how hard we must go to bridge that gap, but it's
| quite hard and far.
|
| I also see no reason to "lay down and die" as I feel is
| somewhat implied here. I think it's a truly noble cause, but
| maybe I read too much sci-fi as a young lad.
| gf000 wrote:
| Musk's whole mission is to scam even more people. Unfortunately
| people still buy his bullshit even though he couldn't deliver
| on anything, and just converts one failure to hyping up his
| next idiotic product.
|
| (Yes, I know what steel manning is)
| jsumrall wrote:
| Couldn't deliver on anything?
| grim_io wrote:
| A data center in space is probably toast after some years of
| space radiation.
|
| High performance chips are made for the shielded atmosphere.
| Imagine the cost launching all the extra shielding that you
| don't need on earth.
|
| It is beyond stupid. Comical levels. I can't believe people are
| trying to find any justification.
| antonymoose wrote:
| I'm not the right type of engineer to know and, hell,
| software largely isn't engineering anyway...
|
| Can you not provide any type of shielding at scale to wrap a
| (small, not Google tier) data center? To be honest my
| criticism with TFA is its focus on "you can't do massive
| scale" rather than the premise entirely.
| redwood wrote:
| I'd be curious to know simply how large the thermal radiator
| necessary to keep a typical GPU server cooled would be. Do they
| completely dwarf the server size? Can you do something with some
| esoteric material that is not particularly load-bearing but holds
| up well in space to get around some of these challenges?
| heisenbit wrote:
| Data centers in space are the logical progression from the multi
| trillion business of m2m and edge computing. It removes all
| physical limits to investment.
| gf000 wrote:
| You mean physical reality
| ortusdux wrote:
| Is there any insight into how Starlink solved cooling? One
| 'expert' insisted that there is no reason to expect that data
| center satellites would generate any more heat than starlinks.
| thfuran wrote:
| Those have a power budget of about 1 rack. I would expect a
| datacenter satellite to need more cooling if it has more
| compute.
| retube wrote:
| It's lala land nonsense.
|
| - Data centres need a lot of power = giant vast solar panels
|
| - Data centres need a lot of cooling. That's some almighty
| heatsinks you're going need
|
| - They will need to be radiation-hardened to avoid memory
| corruption = even more mass
|
| - The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and will
| need replacing to stay competitive
|
| - Data centres are about 100x bigger (not including solar panels
| and heat sinks) than the biggest thing we've ever put in space
|
| Tesla is losing market share (and rank increasingly poorly
| against alternatives), his robots are gonna fail, this datacentre
| ambition needs to break the laws of physics, grok/twitter is a
| fake news pedo-loving cesspit that's gonna be regulated into
| oblivion. Its only down from here on out.
| cyberax wrote:
| > - The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and
| will need replacing to stay competitive
|
| Hey! It can be de-orbited onto the location of your choosing. I
| bet you can sell this service to the DoD!
|
| Barring that, you can sell it on the global market to the
| highest bidder.
| geoffeg wrote:
| Maybe instead of housing life, civilizations develop Dyson's
| spheres to house data centers. Solar panels on the interior,
| thermal radiators on the exterior and the data centers make up
| the structure in between. Combine that Von Neumann probes and
| you've got a fun new Fermi paradox hypothesis!
| Terr_ wrote:
| I'm convinced that >30% of this comes from ideas leaking out of
| fiction such as like _Neuromancer_ , and percolating through the
| minds of wealthy people attracted to some of the concepts.
| Namely, the dream of being a hyper-wealthy dynasty, above any
| earthly government, controlling an extraterritorial Las Vegas
| Fiefdom In Space. (Which in the book, _also_ hosted a powerful
| AI.)
|
| Then they work backwards, trying to figure out some economic
| engine to make it happen. "Data centers" are (A) in-vogue for
| investment right now and (B) vaguely plausible, at least compared
| to having a space-casino.
| turtletontine wrote:
| I've come to think of interviews with people like Sam Altman as
| "freestyle science fiction." They're just saying stuff off the
| top of their head. Like you say, that often entails vague ideas
| from other sci fi percolating up and out, with no consideration
| of if they actually make sense. And like most freestyle, it's
| usually pretty bad.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| That is possible because DOGE and their comrades gutted the
| SEC and indirectly FINRA like a fish. The government is run
| by confidence men running crypto scams.
|
| That's how the CFO of OpenAI can essentially say "we need a
| Federal bailout", and then turn around and say "lol just
| joking".
| mbb70 wrote:
| That's not fair! Sometimes the ideas come from Snow Crash,
| which gave us the Metaverse because Zuckerberg wanted to cut a
| guy in half with a katana from a motorcycle.
| ozim wrote:
| *Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective
| relative to normal data centers*.
|
| Disagree there are bunch of scenarios where Data Centers in space
| make sense. Like nuclear annihilation and having vaults across
| the globe to communicate and get back lost information because
| ground data centers would be wiped out by EMP from blasts.
| proggy wrote:
| Has it occurred to _anyone_ that you can put computers
| underground? In this apocalyptic scenario you are describing,
| how do you expect the ground based command and control
| infrastructure to survive? Satellites are 100% reliant on
| ground based operations. That is a hard requirement. And if you
| put the command and control underground, might as well just
| skip the whole space based plan and just put the data
| underground.
| grim_io wrote:
| And here I thought Musk's fans are all about digging holes in
| the ground. The flamethrower fumes might have caused
| temporary amnesia.
| ozim wrote:
| Why is it hard requirement?
|
| You can make some part of operations on high orbit that won't
| decay as much then more ops on lower orbits that decay
| faster.
|
| If you put stuff underground it is much harder to
| communicate.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| After the bulk of humanity is wiped out, it will be a comfort
| that I can still use AI to generate dank memes.
| wmf wrote:
| Counterpoint: https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1997906033168330816
|
| (If you can't xcancel it yourself your hacker card is revoked.)
| burkaman wrote:
| This is not a counterpoint, it is a post discussing the same
| topic but it doesn't address any of the points in this article.
| turtletontine wrote:
| That post does not appear to address or acknowledge any of
| these problems: 1) thermal management in space, 2) radiation
| degrading the onboard silicon, 3) you can't upgrade data
| centers in orbit
| arjie wrote:
| It doesn't make any sense to me either, but there are lots of
| things like that where the other thing is harder. As an example,
| a thing people say online a lot is something like "Why do the
| techbros build self-driving cars instead of just putting it on
| rails for efficiency and then they could call it a TRAIN?"
|
| The answer to that is that coordination problems are really hard.
| Much harder even than what are currently unsolved engineering
| problems. In fact, SpaceX can only launch from California because
| they have DOD coverage for their launches. Otherwise the
| California Coastal Commission et al. would have blocked them
| entirely. Perhaps the innovation for affordable space Internet is
| combining it with mixed-use technology.
|
| The truth is that in America today self-driving cars (regulated
| by a state board run by bureaucrats) are easier to build than
| trains (regulated by every property owner on the train route).
| Mark Zuckerberg tried to spend some money evaluating a train
| across the Bay and had to give up. But Robotaxi service is live
| in San Francisco.
|
| So if there is an angle that makes sense to me it's that they
| anticipate engineering challenges beatable in a way where
| regulatory challenges are not.
| wrs wrote:
| Next up, the Boring Company gets imaginary contract for
| _underground_ datacenters, is now valued at $500B.
| m463 wrote:
| there was an article recently about a company wanting to put
| nuclear reactors at the bottom of very deep boreholes (like km
| deep).
|
| I thought that was actually quite interesting/practical,
| because if there is a problem, you can just bury the problem.
|
| not like tmi/fukushima/chernobyl
| sollewitt wrote:
| The bigger issue: datacenters in space are disposable. All the
| extremely recyclable aluminum, silica - you extract it,
| manufacture it and instead of recycling it when it's done you
| incinerate it in the atmosphere and scatter the ashes far and
| wide across the earth, the harder to recapture later.
|
| You do this when the most fragile part in the system fails. Solar
| panels good for 25 years but the SSDs burn out after 2?
| Incinerate the lot!
|
| This kind of thinking is late capitalist brain rot. This kind of
| waste should be a crime.
| marze wrote:
| If you read these comments carefully, you see that they can all
| be summed up as:
|
| "That Musk guy is so naive to think you can put data centers in
| space, what a doof".
|
| Similar comments were probably made regarding electric cars,
| reusable rockets, buying Twitter, and so on.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| I am willing to bet the whole xAI/SpaceX merger is simply a ploy
| by Musk to evade releasing accurate historical information about
| SpaceX's finances. How much did it _actually_ cost SpaceX to
| launch a kilogram of payload into space each year? How much is
| NASA _actually_ donating them, per each year?
|
| I mean, I still remember promises of $1000-per-kg for space
| launches, and how e.g. Gigafactory will produce half of the world
| battery supply, and other non-scientific fiction peddled by Musk.
| Remember when SpaceX suggested in 2019 that the US Army could use
| its Starship rockets to transport troops and supplies across the
| planet in minutes? I do. By the way, have they finished testing
| Starship yet, is it ready?
| Garlef wrote:
| I guess the xAI/SpaceX thing is mainly a financial move and they
| made up an interesting story to give it some context
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