More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43977188
Wonder if that would be less impactful than how ever many rockets they'll need to send up, plus you could, ya know, ~drive~ bike to a failed machine.
So, it's the solar/cooling panels that make up that space, not the data centre per se.
Even the ISS has sizable radiators. The Shuttle had deployable radiators in the form of the bay doors if my memory serves me correctly.
Oddly enough the otherwise dumb Avatar films are among the only ones to show starships with something approaching proper radiators.
There’s no air resistance in space so radiators don’t impact your flight characteristics.
I'm pretty sure it was that series that also described https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_droplet_radiator , with the side effects of different ships having very distinct heat patterns because of their radiator patterns. And that if a ship ever had to make a turn while they were active, big glowing arcs of slowly-cooling droplets would be flung out into space and leave a kind of heat plume.
> Next [after loading the computers with on-orbit software] we opened the payload bay doors. The inside of those doors contained radiators used to dump the heat generated by our electronics into space. If they failed to open, we’d have only a couple hours to get Discovery back on Earth before she fried her brains. But both doors swung open as planned, another milestone passed.
I imagine it's the same reason James Cameron is a world expert on submersibles - the guy picks individual topics in his movies to really get right.
Here on earth we are surrounded by many molecules, that are not so cold, but colder than us and together they can take a lot of our excess heat energy away.
Stuff in space does.
This prompted my curiosity. None of the following contradicts the thrust of your message, but I thought the nuance is interesting to share.
Interstellar space isn't a vacuum. Space is mostly empty compared to Earthly standards, but it still contains gas (mostly hydrogen and helium), dust, radiation, magnetic fields, and quantum activity.
The emptiest regions are incredibly sparse, but not completely empty. Even in a perfect vacuum, quantum mechanics predicst that particle-antiparticle pairs constantly pop in and out of existence, so empty space can be said to be buzzing with tiny fluctuations.
> Space is not cold. It has no real value for temperature. Stuff in space does.
The cosmic microwave background radiation, the left-over energy from the Big Bang, sets a baseline temperature of about 2.7K (-270°C), just above absolute zero.
Temperature depends on particle collisions, and since space isn't a vacuum, just incredibly sparse, one can talk about the temperature of space, but you're right that what is typically more relevant is the temperature of relevant objects.
They’re the same sort as the cold fusion people coming out of the woodwork with “investment opportunities” during the peak of ZIRP.
The first thing to consider is that this thing won’t be stationary!
Geosynchronous orbit is much more expensive to reach per kg launched, even for Starship… when it starts working properly.
Lower orbits… aren’t stationary. Who wants a data centre that’s “over the horizon” from the owning country most of the time!?
If you think AWS egress costs are bad? Just add some zeroes! No, more zeroes than that…
Would probably need to negotiate for a huge amount of dedicated priority bandwidth, but latency shouldn't actually be that bad.
* while there could, in principle, be no extra infra in the last 200 km vertically, that means someone on the ground is talking directly to GEO. As per similar discussion about big PV space stations beaming power to the ground, your minimum ground spot size for a transmitter this big and this far away is still tens of km, which limits the other parts of your overall system design.
Of all the things insane about this proposal, I'm not very bothered about this one. It could be high availability and distributed by default. Like having redundant datacenters with eventual consistency on all continents. Except the continents are spinning really fast above you...
The animation is wild... 5GW concentrated up there at the top of a field of solar panels - it's not a Starcloud, it's an electric Starfurnace.
You pretty much have to have multiple redundancy and special space-rated HW, which I wouldn't be surprised is stuck at super old process nodes to mitigate this exact same issue.
I believe it's on the order of magnitude of 100x return (for a low-orbit space photovoltiac panel that's (almost) always facing direct sun).
(/ (* ([W (kg -1)] 200) ;; reasonable space PV power/mass ratio
([year] 10) ;; guess at lifespan
([ton] 100)) ;; Starship payload
(* ([ton] 1000) ;; tons of liquid methane in Starsihp
([J (kg -1)] 5e7))) ;; specific energy density of CH₄
;; => 126.226944That is...very, very large.
The sun will be eclipsed by earth many times per day, requiring you to either shift all workloads or add substantial UPS weight. The radiator grid you need to cool 125kw is something like 16x the size of the entire data center.
I watched this video last week that went into 3 different scenarios, it's a good watch.
Depends on the orbit.
My understanding was that water-demands on Earth were an overblown issue and minuscule when compared to other uses of fresh water such as watering one acre of farmland.
Not to mention, "used" water is just "warm" water that can then be used again for other purposes.
So are they perpetuating a myth here? Or is water use a bigger issue than I thought?
Also, the "warm" water has already destroyed ecosystems because the data centers are just dumping it. It's a completely solvable issue if we had any common sense regulations.
Energy went into mining, extracting, refining, transporting all the raw materials needed to make these chips.
This is typical tech industry green washing as the industry fails to accept its destructive influence on the planet.
We need practical solutions that help reduce consumption and waste and actually address the issues. We don’t always need more we need to find a way to use less.
Can I bet on the contrary odds? Could throw down my whole retirement with confidence
Think: "AI will replace all software developers in 6 months"
The famously heat conductive vacuum...
Someone fedex a vacuum flask full of hot coffee to nvidia HQ with an explanatory note.
1) Space debris. This is proposal is several orders of magnitude larger than the biggest things in near-Earth orbits. Thus equally many orders more likely to be hit by, and create, space debris
2) Heat transport - this isn't my home turf, but I can't imagine building something lightweight enough to be launched, yet also capable of transferring enough heat away from the 5 GW core, without it melting/breaking
It's been a while since I read their whitepaper, but I don't recall either of those points being addressed.
Now we have one - venture capital.
I would guess in a system where coolant is pumped and the added heat of that you'll have a similar problem. This is probably further exacerbated by the fact that you cant do clever things to increase surface area - your radiating surfaces must all "see" the black of space in order to function.
Solar energy available around the clock allows it to be self-sufficient for a long time.
I suppose there will be some demand for high-security, high-price setups like that.
Or they are not geostationary but it also means the datacenter will connect to a different earth base station which means the data access route would change and latency would increase which would be unacceptable for a lot of use cases.
You would then need to replicate and synchronise customer data across the different space data centres to make it possible to access said data in constant and low-latency time.
Aren't there advantages to fabricating GO Graphene Oxide and CNT Carbon Nanotubes in microgravity?
So far, it’s just a dream that convinced some investors to part with their money.
Also Altman: Let's build gigawatts of nuclear for AI
Musk: has stake in space and AI companies
Also Musk: Let's build AI datacenters in space
wiz21c•2h ago
Moreover, why are the energy cost 10x lower when in space you have unlimited access to sun power? Is it the cost of building the energy production infrastructure ?
wiz21c•2h ago
spicybright•1h ago
I'm surprised nvidia put their name on this.
ben_w•1h ago
It's not a slam-dunk "no", we are seeing developments on all metrics. It's just that right now, I wouldn't be surprised if the claim of x10 improvement was anywhere from correct to x100 over-optimistic.