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Comment by sulam

4 hours ago

Tl;dr — but it’s too heavy

You’re making some decent points here, but you’re either forgetting or ignoring the major thing that people usually neglect to mention when they want to make a case for this (crazy) idea — weight. Unless SpaceX is going to completely redesign hardware such that it is optimized entirely for its mass, it requires many (many) launches to even get a small set of racks into space. I don’t normally get up in arms about the CO2 emissions of data centers, I think there is offsetting value created by their use, but I would absolutely protest trying to put data centers in space and do my best to shut down the hundreds, if not thousands of launches it would take to achieve even a tiny fraction of an AI data center.

Have you calculated the CO2 output of Terran datacenters run on natural gas vs. space datacenters run on solar? The launch CO2 usage is one time, the datacenter energy is for the life of the equipment.