Comment by Voloskaya
17 hours ago
> For maintenance, they plan to have a modular architecture that allows upgrading and/or replacing failed/obsolete servers. If launch costs are low enough to allow for launching a datacenter into space, they'll be low enough to allow for launching replacement modules.
This is hiding so, so much complexity behind a simple hand wavy “modular”. I have trained large models on thousands of GPUs, hardware failure happen all the time. Last example in date: an infiniband interface flapping which ultimately had to be physically replaced. What do you do if your DC is in space? Do you just jettison the entire multi million $ DGX pod that contains the faulty 300$ interface before sending a new one? Do you have an army of astronauts + Dragons to do this manually? Do we hope we have achieve super intelligence by then and have robots that can do this for us ?
Waving the “Modular” magic key word doesn’t really cut it for me.
> Whether or not their business is viable depends on the future cost of launches and the future cost of batteries. If batteries get really cheap, it will be economically feasible to have an off-the-grid datacenter on the ground. There's not much point in launching a datacenter into space if you can power it on the ground 24/7 with solar + batteries.
Something tells me that the price of batteries is already cheap enough for terrestrial data centers to make more economic sense than launching a datacenter - which will also need batteries - into space.
The cheapest batteries today are around $100/kWh. Optimistically assuming 12 hours of sunlight per day, a 40MW datacenter would need 480MWh of batteries to cover the dark period, costing $50 million. Realistically you'd need at least 16 hours worth of batteries to cover winter months when the night is longer, raising your battery costs to $65 million. You'd also need ≈5x more solar panels than in space, and these panels would be more expensive due to shielding from weather. 120MW of ground-based solar panels would cost around $100 million.
Assuming the $165M of panels and batteries last for a decade, and there are no maintenance costs, they'll provide 3,504,000MWh over that time for an energy cost of 4.7 cents per kWh. This is competitive with grid power in some places. It also has the advantage of not needing backup generators. But maintenance costs do exist, and it makes more financial sense to buy power as you use it rather than pay upfront.
https://www.wesa.fm/environment-energy/2024-02-19/weirton-fo...
> Optimistically assuming 12 hours of sunlight per day, a 40MW datacenter would need 480MWh of batteries to cover the dark period, costing $50 million.
A 40MW data center doesn't run constantly at 40MW. That's its load rating. Like any industrial facility, actual peak loads are probably around 80% and average loads are lower.
Also, why do you assume that the data center has to be off-grid? That's a constraint of a space-based datacenter, not a ground based datacenter.
Datacenters with storage can complement grid power.
> The cheapest batteries today are around $100/kWh.
If we are comparing ground based data centers to hypothetical space based ones, then consider that grid scale iron air batteries are coming soon at $20/kWh.
https://www.wesa.fm/environment-energy/2024-02-19/weirton-fo...
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