Comment by nwellinghoff
3 hours ago
Yeah it does not make a whole lot of sense as the useful lifespan of the gpus in 4-6 years. Sooo what happens when you need to upgrade or repair?
3 hours ago
Yeah it does not make a whole lot of sense as the useful lifespan of the gpus in 4-6 years. Sooo what happens when you need to upgrade or repair?
A "fully and rapidly reusable" Starship would bring the cost of launch down orders of magnitude, perhaps to a level where it makes sense to send up satellites to repair/refuel other satellites.
This is a question that analysts don't even ask on earnings calls for companies with lowly earthbound datacenters full of the same GPUs.
The stock moves based on the same promise that's already unchecked without this new "in space" suffix:
We'll build datacenters using money we don't have yet, fill them with GPUs we haven't secured or even sourced, power them with infrastructure that can't be built in the promised time, and profit on their inference time over an ever-increasing (on paper) lifespan.
> This is a question that analysts don't even ask
On the contrary, data centers continue to pop up deploying thousands of GPUs specifically because the numbers work out.
The H100 launched at $30k GPU and rented for $2.50/hr. It's been 3 years since launch, the rent price is still around $2.50.
During these 3 years, it has brought in $65k in revenue.
They can run these things at 100% utilization for 3 years straight? And not burn them out? That's impressive.
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> the useful lifespan of the gpus in 4-6 years. Sooo what happens when you need to upgrade or repair?
Average life of starlink satellite is around 4-5 years
With zero energy cost it will run until it stops working or runs out of fuel, which I'm guessing is between 5-7 years.
5 to 7 months given they want 100kw Per ton and magical mystery sauce shielding is going to do shit all.
> Sooo what happens when you need to upgrade or repair?
The satellite deorbits and you launch the next one.
not to mention that radiation hardening of chips has a big impact on cost and performance