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Comment by jsheard

8 hours ago

> Current advances in AI are dependent on large terrestrial data centers, which require immense amounts of power and cooling.

You know what's even harder to cool?

> Orbital Data Centers

6 comments

jsheard

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dwood_dev  8 hours ago

I really would like to see a cost and cooling breakdown. I just can't see how you can do radiative cooling on the scales required, not to mention hardening.

I thought this was a troll by Elon, now I'm leaning towards not. I don't see how whatever you build being dramatically faster and cheaper to do on land, even 100% grid independent with solar and battery. Even if the launch cost was just fuel, everything else that goes into putting data centers in space dwarfs the cost of 4x solar plus battery.

abakus  8 hours ago

Nobody knows cooling satellites better than SpaceX

  • lukan  8 hours ago

    I cannot really tell satire apart from genuine opinions anymore.

    (But I do hope it was satire, if not, cooling satelites was/is a big issue and they only have very modest heat creation. A data center would be in a quite different ballpark)

  • jsheard  8 hours ago

    Maybe so, but the actual SpaceX engineers are powerless to stop Elon running his mouth.