Comment by t0mas88
6 hours ago
They will have moat in the satellite launching business, which is not useful in the AI datacenter market.
You can put AI chips in datacenters in the desert for far less than $100/kg. With lots of solar power available, the option to easily access your hardware and far less radiation issues.
The datacenter in space story really only exists to make it possible for Musk to sell X to SpaceX and make more money from the IPO. That's all. There is no engineering reason.
Yours is the only valid argument. If space datacenters are not competitive with terrestrial (in terms of megatokens/$ or whatever), then they will never work and SpaceX will fail. That's the whole ball game.
But anyone who thinks they can predict those prices in ten years is wildly overconfident.
It's not an engineering bet.
Musk's bet is dysfunctional politics will make it impossible to build enough data centres and the energy needed to power them. There are many, many reasons that might be wrong. However, if the economics are even close to viable, they could start throwing up data centres quicker than anyone can build them terrestrially (at least in the democratic west).
So to be clear, the prediction is that every single location on earth will be economically infeasible due to politics, and that these same politics will have no impact on the launch or satellite businesses?
GMAFB.
It's stock pump bullshit from a guy who has figured out how to extract the maximum from stock markets.
Meanwhile Nvidia just announced a space-optimized Vera Rubin designed with SpaceX designed for orbital datacenters.
But yeah, I'm sure you people with Elon Derangement Syndrome actually have it all figured out /s
https://x.com/nvidia/status/2091920680317046847
1 reply →
> You can put AI chips in datacenters in the desert for far less than $100/kg
if you can't put them outside of Amarillo Texas without people throwing a fit then you can't put them anywhere. I mean freaking Pantex is there ffs!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantex
Any cooling issues to be resolved?
No.
Cooling is probably the easiest problem to solve, easier than power. And in both cases, the problem is solved by mass to orbit. All you need for cooling is a big f-ing radiator. Solar panels are chips, and not trivial to manufacture. But a radiator is just a hunk of metal with some pipes.
That's why the cost of mass to orbit is the most important thing. You can solve almost any space problem by just throwing more mass at it.