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.
1) The atmosphere attenuates sunlight (even when it's not cloudy)
2) The solar array in orbit can pivot to face the sun all the time.
3) While most orbits will go into earth's shadow some of the time, on average they'll be in sunlight more of the time than a typical point on the surface.
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.
> Because caches hold the most recent and most relevant data to the current processing, it is critical that this data be accurate. To enable this, AMD has designed EPYC with multiple tiers of cache protection. The level 1 data cache includes SEC-DED ECC, which can detect two-bit errors and correct single-bit errors. Through parity and retry, L1 data cache tag errors and L1 instruction cache errors are automatically corrected. The L2 and L3 caches are extended even further with the ability to correct double errors and detect triple errors.
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 "specific" objects.
For solar panels:
Assuming area of 1000 square meters (30m x 30m square), solar irradiance of 1 kW/m^2, efficiency of 0.2. As a result power is 200 kW.
For radiators:
Stefan-Boltzmann constant 6E-8, temperature difference of 300 K, emissivity of one, we get total radiator power 1000 x 6E-8 x 300^4 = 486 kW.
The radiator number is bigger so the radiator could be smaller than the solar panels and could still radiate away all the heat. With caveats.
Temperature difference in the radiator is the biggest open question, and the design is very sensitive to that. Say if your chips run at 70 C (340 K), what is the cool temperature needed to cool down to, what is the assumed solar and earth flux hitting the radiator, depends on geometry and so on. And then in reality part of the radiator is cooler and radiates way less, so most of the energy is radiated from the hot part. How low do you need to get the cool end temperature to, in order to not fry your chips? I guess you could run at very high flow rates and small temperature deltas to minimize radiator size but then rest of the system becomes heavier.
I'm skeptical that it makes any economic sense to put a datacenter in orbit, but the focus on the radiators in the last discussion was odd - if you can make the power generation work, you can make the heat dissipation work.
Any data center that isn't generating massive heat is a waste of our time.
And no, JWST is not doing industrial scale cooling.
I could be wrong and this will be a slam dunk. To me, however, the costs/complexity (Cooling, SRP perturbation, stationkeeping, rendezvous, etc.) far outweigh the benefits of the Cheap as Free (tm) solar power
The difference between a criminal and a law-abiding citizen isn't that the citizen knows that crimes are wrong, it's that the citizen cares that crimes are wrong and the criminal doesn't.
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.
Fine for some applications, but a massive regression from modern fiber infrastructure and definitely not suitable for everything (just think how slow the modern web is even with 15ms connections to datacenters). There's a reason why Starlink & co are trying to set up communication satellites closer to the ground.
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.
By the way, the same channel also has a sobering video on commercial space stations. https://youtube.com/watch?v=2G60Y3ydtqY
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.
Space is just unfathomably large. If you aren’t in the same orbital plane, you’re just not going to have a problem. And if you did, Kessler syndrome in LEO is a non problem.
Could be an issue for specific orbital planes in stable orbits, but even there, it’s overblown.
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.
Due to the Earth's axial tilt [1], geostationary orbits generally have 24 hour sun exposure, except for a few minutes a day around the equinoxes [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_tilt
[2] https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/our-satellites/currently-flying/...
Oh you can bet that, if we assume this happens in 10 years, various countries will absolutely do a "land grab" up high. There is no escaping it.
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
Can't wait for an alien to NIMBY one of these.
[x] no permitting, cultural, wildlife
[x] no local opposition.
[x] site control
Unfortunately, this is balance sheet financing so big boys only.
Shielding also.
And latency.
Edit: Some back of the envelope calculation suggests that the total cross-sectional area of all man-made orbiting satellites is around 55000 m^2. Just one 4km x 4km = 1600000m^2 starcloud would represent an increase by a factor of about 300. That's insane.
e.g., Cianide seems bad, but it won't kill you if the relative volumes are small.
tl;dr: You haven't characterized the denominator.
> increase in a risk factor of over 300
Even with a numerator-only view, I suspect it's not fair to characterize the "risk factor" as going up 300x. There's a lot more nuance about orbits in space.
Getting back to the point:
You literally claimed that one of these would "inevitabl[y]" trigger a Kessler effect with no proof.
> something literally 1000x bigger be even more concerning.
Again, this isn't convincing if you don't have the denominator/context. Think about it: you still can't answer how many of these are needed to trigger the Kessler effect.
BTW, "increase by a FACTOR of about 300" != "increase in a RISK FACTOR of over 300"
And how long is that life exactly? There is zero chance this is a net positive for carbon emissions, much less a remotely economical way to build or operate datacenters.
If they fulfill their promise within 10 years I'll change careers to kiwi farming. I promise.
> “In space, you get almost unlimited, low-cost renewable energy”
Low cost???????? Sending a solar array into space would probably rank among the most expensive forms of energy production.
> Starcloud’s space-based data centers can use the vacuum of deep space as an infinite heat sink.
Well, good luck getting the heat out first. I hope you planned for some big radiators to go along your 5GW solar array.
> Constant exposure to the sun in orbit also means nearly infinite solar power
Is it an infinite heat sink or an infinite power source?!
I don't get it. I really don't.
You can calculate the minimum cost, you can calculate heat, maintenance and probably also the expected failerrate for the hardware.
But even if the failerrate is something you need to figure out, that would probably some R&D thing which you would test and verify in a very small and cheap setup.
Same stupid shit with the mirror in space which will send sun back to some PV panels on earth.
Cool stuff in a non capitalistic system but otherwise it just shows that plenty of people have too much money to invest in weird things without understanding it at all.
Water consumption of a data center is not a real thing. You don't just consume water. You need it to move heat and you don't need it to remove heat by vaporization.
You can easily use this heat if you actually wanted to do so by heating houses close by or for chemical processes.
Its a legal issue.
And its very resource heavy to put anything in space...
Wouldn't you know, you COULD get the same energy here too.
What happens when this data center becomes obsolete? we've just got a 4km wide piece of junk floating above earth now?
wiz21c•5h 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•4h ago
spicybright•4h ago
I'm surprised nvidia put their name on this.
ben_w•4h 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.