Comment by wat10000
1 day ago
Of course it's working. We've had computers operating in space for decades. There's no doubt it can be done.
The question isn't whether it's possible, the question is why you'd do it just for data centers. We put computers in space because they're needed to do things that can only be done from there. Data centers work just fine on the ground. What's so great about data centers in space that makes them worth the immense cost and difficulty.
I know a lot of prominent people are talking about this. I do not understand it. pg says "when you look at the tradeoffs" well what exactly is he looking at? Because when I look at the tradeoffs, the whole concept makes no damned sense. Sure, you can put a bunch of GPUs in space. But why would you do that when you can put them in a building for orders of magnitude less money?
From what I gather, space beats ground because of permitting processes, land costs, electricity costs, etc. Containers would be cool, but energy and connectivity would be the problem there. Deploying in space gives you:
- Full blown solar (no atmosphere in the way)
- 24/7 solar power
- Almost no regulations or dealing with other humans/threats (pirates go after container ships, what would they do if millions of dollars of CPUs were floating around?)
- very stable, proven comm links (ships would be going through satellite anyway)
All you have to do is figure out cooling, pay for transport, and the fun problem of docking/attaching. Also shielding will probably be a bigger issue than they think, you can't just put a normal chip up in space because the magnetosphere and atmosphere do crazy amounts of shielding that don't really work in the small scale. I assume the GPUs would need a lot more fault tolerance.
Lots of terrestrial locations have the grid. That's nearly 24/7 and it's dirt cheap compared to rockets. There are many places where land is cheap and permitting is easy. They may not be exactly where you'd prefer, but they're going to be a lot closer than space. Stable, proven comm links are easily available in the form of fiber lines. Many of these places are in stable countries where there's no realistic physical threat against your data center. And if people think that putting equipment in space somehow gets them away from regulation, they're going to be in for a very rude shock. Unless they themselves are going to go live in space, they're still very much subject to regulation.