Comment by justanotheratom

9 months ago

wow, one year back, I had made a prediction to a friend that this is the direction that Starlink will head in. I was thinking it would proceed like this:

1. provide internet. 2. provide CDN. 3. Edge Compute. 4. Full-on cloud.

These guys see to be focussing on what is basically offline processing (AI training).

5 comments

justanotheratom

Reply
thrance  9 months ago

More like, these guys will be focused on parting VCs from their money.

Datacenters in space makes no sense at all. Even ignoring the huge cost of sending hardware there in the first place, cooling is a massive issue in space. No medium to sink heat into means the only way to cool anything is by running water through giant infrared radiators. Not ideal when cooling is the largest bottleneck in scaling datacenters. Note that they would also have to dissipate the large amounts heat their datacenter satellite gets from being exposed to the Sun.

Also disregard the cost it takes to send a technician for maintenance, of updating hardware, etc.

  • ekianjo  9 months ago

    > Also disregard the cost it takes to send a technician for maintenance, of updating hardware, etc.

    This won't happen. If a satellite fails they will just write it off. Maintenance would be more expensive than depreciation

    • ceejayoz  9 months ago

      They’re proposing a multi-kilometer sized satellite, though. That’s more akin to demolishing an entire datacenter when something important fails.

      1 reply →