Comment by gambiting
2 months ago
So what exactly is the benefit of having that thing in orbit then, where it costs you millions of dollars to put it there?
2 months ago
So what exactly is the benefit of having that thing in orbit then, where it costs you millions of dollars to put it there?
Self destruction is a feature, not a bug.
That said eventually they can be lifted to higher orbits and have robots deliver and swap updated compute (if not made in space itself!).
The current bottleneck on compute is power and zoning. Solar panels are 5x more efficient in space, and there is no zoning in space.
The current bottleneck is silicon. Every chip that is manufactured gets housed and powered. (It makes sense: the cost of compute is dominated by capex, the power costs are irrelevant, so they're ok paying a premium for power).
The space data center hypothesis relies on compute supply growing faster than power supply. (Both are bottlenecked on parts of the supply chain that will take ages to scale.)
Even if you believe that's the case, the point at which orbital data centers start making sense is incredibly sensitive to the exact growth rates.
The current bottleneck is not silicon. There is plenty of silicon locked up in previous gen GPUs that are no longer efficient enough to run relative to newer models. The bottleneck is the economics of owning the older GPU models - which is why all the GPU neoclouds are gonna go bust unless they can get customers to continue renting old GPUs.
The economics are vastly different when opex is near zero for these things
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Millions of dollars? Where did you get that number from?
...how much do you think each rocket launch costs?
Not millions of dollars per sat. Are you being intentionally obtuse?
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