Comment by sghiassy
10 hours ago
Wish geothermal energy was being discussed more for a power source for data centers.
Iceland has unlimited geothermal energy and a cold climate. Seems a lot easier than going to space for solar energy
10 hours ago
Wish geothermal energy was being discussed more for a power source for data centers.
Iceland has unlimited geothermal energy and a cold climate. Seems a lot easier than going to space for solar energy
In Michael Lewis book Boomerang [0], there is a chapter about Iceland and he mentions geothermal.
My understanding:
- b/c of geothermal, huge amounts of electricity are available for low cost
- Iceland being an island makes it VERY expensive to build/transport goods back and forth
- The above combo means that aluminum smelting is the only industry where the electricity availability outweighed the costs of transport and being on an island.
0 - https://amzn.to/4j8r3bO
I have heard about the benefits of aluminum smelting there before.
We already have transatlantic fiber optic cables so I don’t see why “transportation” costs apply here though
Crypto mining was often mentioned too, but I seldom hear of icelandic Bitcoin miners these days.
It’s hard to come up with any idea that is not easier than going to space for solar energy.
It's easier to dump all the excess heat in Iceland than in space.
I read it as 'it's easier to dump the execs in Iceland than in space` :-D
Which might be true, though the second thing sounds promising as well...
Lots of hamsters in wheels driving tiny generators?
I’m not going to bother to check the math but Gemini estimated $20billion/y to generate 1gw with hamsters on wheels so honestly that could be competitive.
> going to space for solar energy (for data centers)
There are other incentives driving this, I suspect more so. Pushback, land acquisition, grid hookup, legal concerns - many circumvented by going to space.
Data centers in space are simply bullshit. I think we should all stop accepting that it is mentioned like something that has to happen only because Elon says so.
there are already Google TPUs in space
2 replies →
Don't worry, data centers are not going to space.
Exactly. Racks are going to space.
For compute jobs that can be efficiently farmed out to individual racks, this is a nice way to stretch your PV manufacturing capacity to serve more chips (as long as launch costs aren't too high).
For LLM training and other jobs that need an entire datacenter of racks working in parallel, that wouldn't be feasible to do in space with today's technology.