Comment by Saline9515
8 hours ago
I still don't understand the "data center in space" narrative. How are they going to solve the cooling issue?
8 hours ago
I still don't understand the "data center in space" narrative. How are they going to solve the cooling issue?
Maintenance cost must be pretty fucking insane
This "Space Datacenter" sounds like biggest bullshit in last decade, which is pretty damn fucking high bar.
Hes committed to building thousands of Optimus robots for a market that does not exist while cutting back on building evs (a market that does).
I think its pretty clear that Musk has lost his goddamn mind. And the American corporate system and Government seem powerless to do anything.
The reason is probably that Tesla is falling behind on EVs, or at least feels like they've juiced all they can from them at the moment, but advanced robotics is still on the upswing and probably is far from reaching its full potential. They have enough money that moonshots like these probably seem irrelevant at their scale.
As for the space datacenter idea, I think this is just a case of extreme marketing that Musk's ventures are so accustomed to. Making huge promises to pump their stocks while the US government looks the other way. When time comes for them to deliver on their promises, they've already invented ten more outrageous ideas to make you forget about what they promised earlier. Hyperloop as a viable mode of transportation, tunnel networks for Teslas, SpaceX vehicles as a mode of transport, X as the new 'everything app', insane timelines for a Musk-led human mission to Mars. They've done it all.
To be precise: humanoid robot TAM $0; vehicles TAM ~$2.7 trillion.
There is no maintenance, you have many cheap satellites - if one fails you just deorbit it.
How many is "many"?
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I think it's fair to say past 30 years. Dotcom boom only had modest cons by contrast
Same way the dude solved Roadster, full self driving etc.
Presumably the cooling problem gets hand waved away as a technical detail, and the real selling point is data centers that aren't subject to any regional governments laws.
> and the real selling point is data centers that aren't subject to any regional governments laws.
No? ISS isn't exempt from legal systems.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex...
Your link explains that the legal system arises from government agreements specific to the station.
So the csam generator can live on? Why not just pirate radio style it and cool it with ocean water....
Send up a spacecraft with back-to-back / equal area solar panels and radiators (have to reject heat backwards, can't reject it to your neighboring sphere elements!). Push your chip temp as much as possible (90C? 100C?). Find a favorable choice of vapor for a heat pump / Organic Rankine Cycle (possibly dual-loop) to boost the temp to 150C for the radiator. Cool the chip with vapor 20C below its running temp. 20-40% of the solar power goes to run the pumps, leaving 60-80% for the workload (a resistor with extra steps).
There are a lot of degrees of freedom to optimize something like this.
Spacecraft radiator system using a heat pump - https://patents.google.com/patent/US6883588B1/en
Periodically send a crew to a comet to bring back a large slab of ice to put in the data center.
beltalowda!
Remember MoviePass, and how they were losing gobs of money by letting people see unlimited movies for $20/month?
It was so obviously stupid that a bunch of people went, "well, this so clearly can't work that they must have a secret plan to make money, we'll invest on that promise", and then it turned out there was no secret plan, it was as stupid as it looked and it went bankrupt.
The "datacenters in space" thing is a similar play: it's so obviously dumb that a bunch of smart people have tricked themselves into thinking "wow, SpaceX must have actually figured a way it can work!"; SpaceX has not and it is in fact exactly as stupid as it looks.
But it won't end the same as MoviePass until Elon dies; he will keep moving things around, propping up failures with VC, IPO, federal/state (taxpayer) and profit making business money.
The pre-IPO timing of this narrative, combined with Musk’s history of Tesla’s stock pumping, leaves no room for doubt. But, that has worked for Tesla, I’m pretty confident it will work for SpaceX, which will IPO for $1T+.
that's the best part! They don't!
My guess would be just a regular radiator and cooling system like a liquid pump. The only obstacle should be the vacuum. That said I don't have any hopes Elon has any understanding of any of it.
Cooling a datacenter in space isn't really any harder than cooling a starlink in space, the ratio of solar panels to radiating area will have to be about the same. There is nothing uniquely heat-producing about GPUs, ultimately almost all energy collected by a satellite's solar panels ends up as heat in the satellite.
IMO the big problem is the lack of maintainability.
> Cooling a datacenter in space isn't really any harder than cooling a starlink in space
A watt is a watt and cooling isn't any different just because some heat came from a GPU. But a GPU cluster will consume order of magnitudes more electricity, and will require a proportionally larger surface area to radiate heat compared to a starlink satellite.
Best estimate I can find is that a single starlink satellite uses ~5KW of power and has a radiator of a few square meters.
Power usage for 1000 B200's would be in the ballpark of 1000kW. That's around 1000 square meters of radiators.
Then the heat needs to be dispersed evenly across the radiators, which means a lot of heat pipes.
Cooling GPU's in space will be anything but easy and almost certainly won't be cost competitive with ground-based data centers.
Sure, but cooling a starlink in space is a lot more difficult than cooling a starlink on earth would be. And unlike starlink which absolutely must be in space in order to function, data centers work just fine on the ground.
This. There's no scenario where it's cheaper to put them in space.
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According to Gemini, Earth datacenters cost $7m per MW at the low end (without compute) and solar panel power plants cost $0.5-1.5m per MW, giving $7.5-8.5m per MW overall.
Starlink V2 mini satellites are around 10kW and costs $1-1.5m to launch, for a cost of $100-150m per MW.
So if Gemini is right it seems a datacenter made of Starlinks costs 10-20x more and has a limited lifetime, i.e. it seems unprofitable right now.
In general it seems unlikely to be profitable until there is no more space for solar panels on Earth.
All kinds of industries have been conserving more each decade since the energy crisis of the 1970's.
With recent developments, projected use is now skyrocketing like never seen since.
Before that I thought it was calculated that if alternative energy could be sufficiently ramped up, there would be electricity too cheap to meter.
I would like to see that first.
Whoever has the attitude to successfully do "whatever it takes" to get it done would be the one I trust do it in space after that.
His bet then, is that the $1 million cost to get a Starlink V2 mini into orbit can be made cheaper by an order of magnitude or two.
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I think that it's not just about the ratio. To me the difference is that Starlink sattelites are fixed-scope, miniature satellites that perform a limited range of tasks. When you talk about GPUs, though, your goal is maximizing the amount of compute you send up. Which means you need to push as many of these GPUs up there as possible, to the extent where you'd need huge megastructures with solar panels and radiators that would probably start pushing the limits of what in-space construction can do. Sure, the ratio would be the same, but what about the scale?
And you also need it to make sense not just from a maintenance standpoint, but from a financial one. In what world would launching what's equivalent to huge facilities that work perfectly fine on the ground make sense? What's the point? If we had a space elevator and nearly free space deployment, then yeah maybe, but how does this plan square with our current reality?
Oh, and don't forget about getting some good shielding for all those precise, cutting-edge processors.
Assuming you can stay out of the way of other satellites I'd guess you think about density in a different way to building on Earth. From a brief look at the ISS thermal system it would seem the biggest challenge would be getting enough coolant and pumping equipment in orbit for a significant wattage of compute.
Why would you need to fit the GPUs all in one structure?
You can have a swarm of small, disposable satellites with laser links between them.
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