Comment by hirsin
1 day ago
Simply put no, 50MW is not the typical hyperscaler cloud size. It's not even the typical single datacenter size.
A single AI rack consumes 60kW, and there is apparently a single DC that alone consumes 650MW.
When Microsoft puts in a DC, the machines are done in units of a "stamp", ie a couple racks together. These aren't scaled by dollar or sqft, but by the MW.
And on top of that... That's a bunch of satellites not even trying to crunch data at top speed. No where near the right order of magnitude.
But the focus on building giant monolithic datacenters comes from the practicalities of ground based construction. There are huge overheads involved with obtaining permits, grid connections, leveling land, pouring concrete foundations, building roads and increasingly often now, building a power plant on site. So it makes sense to amortize these overheads by building massive facilities, which is why they get so big.
That doesn't mean you need a gigawatt of power before achieving anything useful. For training, maybe, but not for inference which scales horizontally.
With satellites you need an orbital slot and launch time, and I honestly don't know how hard it is to get those, but space is pretty big and the only reasons for denying them would be safety. Once those are obtained done you can make satellite inferencing cubes in a factory and just keep launching them on a cadence.
I also strongly suspect, given some background reading, that radiator tech is very far from optimized. Most stuff we put into space so far just doesn't have big cooling needs, so there wasn't a market for advanced space radiator tech. If now there is, there's probably a lot of low hanging fruit (droplet radiators maybe).
But why would you?
Space has some huge downsides:
* Everything is being irradiated all the time. Things need to be radiation hardened or shielded.
* Putting even 1kg into space takes vast amounts of energy. A Falcon 9 burns 260 MJ of fuel per kg into LEO. I imagine the embodied energy in the disposable rocket and liquid oxygen make the total number 2-3x that at least.
* Cooling is a nightmare. The side of the satellite in the sun is very hot, while the side facing space is incredibly cold. No fans or heat sinks - all the heat has to be conducted from the electronics and radiated into space.
* Orbit keeping requires continuous effort. You need some sort of hypergolic rocket, which has the nasty effect of coating all your stuff in horrible corrosive chemicals
* You can't fix anything. Even a tiny failure means writing off the entire system.
* Everything has to be able to operate in a vacuum. No electrolytic capacitors for you!
So I guess the question is - why bother? The only benefit I can think of is very short "days" and "nights" - so you don't need as much solar or as big a battery to power the thing. But that benefit is surely outweighed by the fact you have to blast it all into space? Why not just overbuild the solar and batteries on earth?
The main reason is that generating energy in space is very cheap and easy due to how ridiculously effective solar panels are.
Someone mentioned in the comments on a similar article that sun synchronous orbits are a thing. This was a new one to me. Apparently there's a trick that takes advantage of the Earth not being a perfect sphere to cause an orbit to precess at the right rate that it matches the Earth's orbit around the sun. So, you can put a satellite into a low-Earth orbit that has continuous sunlight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
Is this worth all the cost and complexity of lobbing a bunch of data centers into orbit? I have no idea. If electricity costs are what's dominating the datacenter costs that AI companies are currently paying, then I'm willing to at least concede that it might be plausible.
If I were being asked to invest in this scheme, I would want to hear a convincing argument why just deploying more solar panels and batteries on Earth to get cheap power isn't a better solution. But since it's not my money, then if Elon is convinced that this is a great idea then he's welcome to prove that he (or more importantly, the people who work for him) have actually got this figured out.
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> So I guess the question is - why bother?
This is a Musk escapade, so my guess would be extraterritoriality and absence of jurisdiction.
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If one kilogram of stuff consumes just 100Wt, then in one month it consumes about 300 MJ. So as long as things works for a year or more energy cost to put them into orbit becomes irrelevant.
To keep things in orbit ion thrusters work nicely and require just inert gases to keep them functioning. Plus on a low Earth orbit there are suggestions that a ramjet that capture few atoms of atmosphere and accelerates them could work.
Radiative cooling scales by 4th power temperature. So if one can design electronics to run at, say, 100 C, then calling would be much less problematic.
But radiation is the real problem. Dealing with that would require entirely different architecture/design.
It would make more sense to develop power beaming technology. Use the knowledge from Starlink constellations to beam solar power via microwaves onto the rooftops of data centers
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Maybe they should try to build it in the moon. Difficult, but perhaps not as difficult?
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"But why would you?"
Because the permitting process is much easier and there are way, way fewer authorities that can potentially shut you down.
I think this is the entire difference. Space is very, very lightly regulated, especially when it comes to labor, construction and environmental law. You need to be able to launch from somewhere and you need to automate a lot of things. But once you can do this, you escaped all but a few authorities that would hold power over you down on Earth.
No one will be able to complain that your data center is taking their water or making their electricity more expensive, for example.
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> I also strongly suspect, given some background reading, that radiator tech is very far from optimized. Most stuff we put into space so far just doesn't have big cooling needs, so there wasn't a market for advanced space radiator tech. If now there is, there's probably a lot of low hanging fruit (droplet radiators maybe).
You'd be wrong. There's a huge incentive to optimized radiator tech because of things like the international space station and MIR. It's a huge part of the deployment due to life having pretty narrow thermal bands. The added cost to deploy that tech also incentivizes hyper optimization.
Making bigger structures doesn't make that problem easier.
Fun fact, heat pipes were invented by NASA in the 60s to help address this very problem.
ISS and MIR combined are not a "large market". How many radiators they require? Probably a single space dc will demand a whole orders of magnitude more cooling
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The ISS is a government project that's heading towards EOL, it has no incentive to heavily optimize anything because the people who built it don't get rich by doing so. SpaceX is what optimization looks like, not the ISS.
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There is a lot of hand waiving away of the orders of magnitude more manufacturing, more launches, and more satellites that have to navigate around each other.
We still don’t have any plan I’ve heard of for avoiding a cascade of space debris when satellites collide and turn into lots of fast moving shrapnel. Yes, space is big, but low Earth orbit is a very tiny subset of all space.
The amount of propulsion satellites have before they become unable to maneuver is relatively small and the more satellite traffic there is, the faster each satellite will exhaust their propulsion gasses.
> We still don’t have any plan I’ve heard of for avoiding a cascade of space debris when satellites collide and turn into lots of fast moving shrapnel.
What do you mean we don’t have any plans to avoid that? It is a super well studied topic of satelite management. Full books have been written on the topic.
Here is just one: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20230002470/downloads/CA...
Did you think satelites are kept apart by good luck and providence?
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>There is a lot of hand waiving away of the orders of magnitude more manufacturing, more launches, and more satellites that have to navigate around each other.
This is exactly like the Boring Company plans to "speed up" boring. Lots of hand waving away decades of commercial boring, sure that their "great minds" can do 10x or 100x better than modern commercial applications. Elon probably said "they could just run the machines faster! I'm brilliant".
All of those “huge overheads” you cite are nothing compared to the huge overhead of building and fueling rockets to launch the vibration- and radiation-hardened versions of the solar panels and GPUs and cooling equipment that you could use much cheaper versions of on Earth. How many permitted, regulated launches would it take to get around the one-time permitting and predictable regulation of a ground-based datacenter?
Are Earth-based datacenters actually bound by some bottleneck that space-based datacenters would not be? Grid connections or on-site power plants take time to build, yes. How long does it take to build the rocket fleet required to launch a space “datacenter” in a reasonable time window?
This is not a problem that needs to be solved. Certainly not worth investing billions in, and definitely not when run by the biggest scam artist of the 21st century.
New GPU dense racks are going up to 300kW, but I believe the normal at moment for hyperscalers is somewhere around ~150kW, can someone confirm?
The energy demand of these DCs is monstrous, I seriously can't imagine something similar being deployed in orbit...
Most of the OEMs are past 300kW racks, planning on 600kW racks within a year or two, with realistic plans to hit a megawatt
Could this be about bypassing government regulation and taxation? Silkroad only needed a tiny server, not 150kW.
The Outer Space Treaty (1967) has a loophole. If you launch from international waters (planned by SpaceX) and the equipment is not owned by a US-company or other legal entity there is significant legal ambiguity. This is Dogecoin with AI. Exploiting this accountability gap and creating a Grok AI plus free-speech platform in space sounds like a typical Elon endeavour.
For the sake of an argument, let’s assume "The Outer Space Treaty (1967) has a loophole. If you launch from international waters (planned by SpaceX) and the equipment is not owned by a US-company or other legal entity there is significant legal ambiguity” is 100% true.
To use that loophole, the rockets launched by SpaceX would have to be “not owned by a US-company”. Do you think the US government would allow that to happen?
Untrue. Responsible for any spacefaring vessel is in all cases the state the entity operating the vessel is registered in. If it's not SpaceX directly but a shell company in Ecuador carrying out the launch, Ecuador will be completely responsible for anything happening with and around the vessel, period. There are no loopholes in this system.
This could simply be done by hosting in the Tor hidden service cloud. Accessing illegal material hosted on a satellite is still exactly as risky for the user (if the user is on earth) as accessing that same illegal material through the Tor network, but hosting it through the Tor network can be done for 1/1000th the cost compared to an orbital solution.
So there's no regulatory or tax benefit to hosting in space.
You cannot escape national regulations like that, at least until a maritime-like situation develops, where rockets will be registered in Liberia for a few dollars and Liberia will not even pretend to care what they are doing.
It may happen one day, but we are very, very far from that. As of now, big countries watch their space corporations very closely and won't let them do this.
Nevertheless, as an American, you can escape state and regional authorities this way. IIRC The Californian Coastal Commission voted against expansion of SpaceX activities from Vandenberg [1], and even in Texas, which is more SpaceX-friendly, there are still regulations to comply with.
If you launch from international waters, these lower authority tiers do not apply.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-14/california...
In addition to all the sibling comments explaining why this wouldn't work, the money's not there.
A grift the size of Dogecoin, or the size of "free speech" enthusiast computing, or even the size of the criminal enterprises that run on the dark web, is tiny in comparison to the footer cost and upkeep of a datacenter in space. It'd also need to be funded by investments (since criminal funds and crypto assets are quite famously not available in up-front volumes for a huge enterprise), which implies a market presence in some country's economy, which implies regulators and risk management, and so on.
No. There is no "one weird trick" when it comes to regulation. The company is based in the US, therefore you just go after that.
Anyway, promising some fantasy and never delivering is definitely a typical Elon endeavor.
You misspelled 'hate speech'.
How much of that power is radiated as the radio waves it sends?
Good point - the comms satellites are not even "keeping" some of the energy, while a DC would. I _am_ now curious about the connection between bandwidth and wattage, but I'm willing to bet that less than 1% of the total energy dissipation on one of these DC satellites would be in the form of satellite-to-earth broadcast (keeping in mind that s2s broadcast would presumably be something of a wash).
I am willing to bet that more than 10% of the electrical energy consumed by the satellite is converted into transmitted microwaves.
There must be many power consumers in the satellite, e.g. radio receivers, lasers, computers and motors, where the consumed energy eventually is converted into heat, but the radio transmitter of a communication satellite must take a big fraction of the average consumed power.
The radio transmitter itself has a great efficiency, much greater than 50%, possibly greater than 90%, so only a small fraction of the electrical power consumed by the transmitter is converted into heat and most is radiated in the microwave signal that goes to Earth's surface.
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I doubt half the power is to the transmitter, and radio efficiency is poor -- 20% might be a good starting point.
Is the SpaceX thin-foil cooling based on graphene real? Can experts check this out?
"SmartIR’s graphene-based radiator launches on SpaceX Falcon 9" [1]. This could be the magic behind this bet on heat radiation through exotic material. Lot of blog posts say impossible, expensive, stock pump, etc. Could this be the underlying technology breakthrough? Along with avoiding complex self-assembly in space through decentralization (1 million AI constellation, laser-grid comms).
[1] https://www.graphene-info.com/smartir-s-graphene-based-radia...
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Entirely depends on band, at 10GHz more like 40%, at lower frequencies more, for example FM band can even go to 70%
the majority is likely in radio waves and the inter satellite laser communication
Inter sat comms cancels out - every kw sent by one sat is received by another.
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The radio receiver and transmitter are additional hardware and energy consumption. They add to the heat, not subtract from it.
I think you missed the point. If you have a 100 MW communicstion satellite and a 100 MW compute satellite those are very different beasts. The first might send 50% of the energy away as radio communication making it effectively a 50 MW satellitefor cooling purposes.
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For another reference, the Nvidia-OpenAI deal is reportedly 10GW worth of DC.