But oddly this doesn't seem to be how the concept is typically framed.
My second level curiosity is how much cheaper/competitive it'd be if we had space elevators.
I suspect it is about the regulatory environment. The regulatory environment on data centers is moving quickly. Data centers used to be considered a small portion of the economy and thus benign and not worth extorting/controlling. This seems to be changing, rapidly.
Given that data centers only exchange information with their consumers they are a natural candidate for using orbit as a way to escape regulators.
Further, people are likely betting that regulators will take considerable time to adjust since space is multinational.
My point is that you can actually reduce it all to dollars. And I believe that the cost of orbital data centers will come down due to technological advances, while the cost of regulation will only go up, because of local and global opposition.
I'm not sure. A couple of points:
1) The regulatory landscape is enormous. It is unknown from which angle regulators will "slow you down."
2) As I mentioned the regulatory frameworks in this area are evolving very quickly. It is unknown what the regulations will be in 1, 2, 5 years and how that will impact your business.
That's not true for people experienced in the particular industry. Others can find a lawyer that will give them a good picture.
It’s a bit like the cyberpunk future when the ultra riches live in moon bases or undersea bases and ordinary people fight for resources in a ruined earth.
The numbers don't quite work out in favor of orbital datacenters at the current values. But we can tell from analyses like this what has to change to get there.
These numbers are just random bullsh*t numbers.
And what problems do orbital datacenters solve? They still need uplink, so not libertarian we can do what we want, you have no jurisdiction here thing.
This is just a sci-fi idea that is theoretically possible and is riding the ai bubble for users and investors that don’t know better.
I 100% agree with this. There are ~2,600 billionaires in the world and we should encourage all of them to spend their money. Even buying a superyacht is a benefit to the economy. But the best billionaires, like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, are actually trying to advance the tech tree.
We are honestly lucky that Musk is wired funny. Any normal human being would retire and hang out on the beach with supermodels after all the abuse he has taken. But he takes it all as a personal challenge and doubles down. That is both his worst quality and his best.
First, he seeks and creates conflict. He isn't 'taking' abuse, except in the sense that he is reaching out and grasping at it.
Everyone in that position takes lots of abuse. If they built their own fortune, they generally don't retire to the beach or they would have long ago.
But I think we'd be better off if taking a political position did not automatically piss off half the country. I think a lot of competent but normal people refuse the get involved in politics because of how toxic it is.
I wish Musk had stayed out of politics, but I'm glad he hasn't given up on Tesla/SpaceX just because of the enemies he's made. I think any normal person would have.
He's been possibly the world's leading troll since long before his MAGA phase. Let's be serious.
You’re falling victim to the ‘broken windows fallacy’ here; money which is invested is actually more productive in improving medium and long term economic productivity than ‘consumption’ goods. Even ‘retained’ money (under one’s mattress) is not net-negative, as it increases the value of its circulating counterparts.
Scenario B: A homeowner adds a new window to their home.
Scenario C: A homeowner buys an online-course to learn how to make windows and then adds one to their home.
Scenario A has approximately no benefit to the economy. The homeowner is no better off (same number of windows) but had to spend money. The window maker might be better off, but only to the same extent that the homeowner is worse off.
I totally agree that Scenario A is not a benefit to the economy. That's the "broken window fallacy".
But Scenario B is definitely better for the economy. The homeowner has decided that having a new window is better than having the money. So the homeowner is better off. The window maker is also better off because they get the money. This is what happens when a billionaire buys a yacht.
Scenario C is the best. The homeowner has a new skill, which they can use to add more windows to their house or maybe their neighbors' houses. Over time, the amount of money spent on window-making will decrease, but the number of windows will stay constant or increase. That's a net benefit. And the online-course creator still made money.
This is what Musk is doing. He is developing new technologies that enable new capabilities and/or make existing things cheaper (e.g., electric cars, access to space, rural internet connectivity).
There is also Scenario D: The homeowner doesn't buy a new window but just keeps his money under his mattress. This is clearly the worst for the economy. Hording money like that means that there is less money circulating and lowered economic activity. The window maker is worse off, and even the homeowner is worse off if they would like to have a new window.
Billionaires who don't spend their money are the real danger, not the ones who tweet too much.
Investing their money is slightly better in that it makes the price of borrowing cheaper. But that only helps up to a point. Someone has to spend money or else there's no point in being able to borrow some. So I wish more billionaires were following Scenario C.
Scenario D: A homeowner adds 10 window to their home because the populous think he is stingy and will send him to the guillotine if he does not start spending his money on new windows!
Scenario D provides no benefit to society.
If the billionaire does want the yacht, then no encouragement is needed.
Is the hope that Elon or fans of his read it and get offended? I doubt they care much, and I fail to see the point of it.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/musks-net-worth-hits-600-2022...
He is a walking billboard.
Somehow I don't think those are the only options. AFAIK Starlink is using a lot of non-rad-hard silicon already.
Random errors will occur you just need to be checking fast enough to fix and update that bad bit flip.
I am sure there's all sorts of fun algorithms in this space but I am under the impression there is SOME tax to doing this. What is the tax? Is it 10% ir 60% I have no idea would love to know!
The unit economics of orbital GPUs suggest that we'll need to run them for much longer than that. This is actually one of the few good points of orbital data centers, normally older hardware is cycled out because it's not economic to run anymore due to power efficiency improvements, but if your power is "free" and you've already got sufficient solar power onboard for the compute, you can just keep running old compute as long as you can keep the satellite up there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16527007 ("First firing of air-breathing electric thruster (esa.int)" (2018))
I'd be interested to know what the average lifespan or failure rate of Starlink has been. That's good that some are still up there 6+ years later, but I know many aren't. I'm not sure how many of those ran out of fuel, had hardware failures, or were simply obsolete, but an AFR would be interesting to see.
Besides, that's even more mass to be lofted. Pushing the economics further into the ludicrous end.
I think “won’t”. I could be wrong of course, but I imagine efforts to put servers into orbit will die before anything is launched. It’s just a bad idea. Maybe a few grifters will make bank taking suckers’ money before it becomes common knowledge that this is stupid, but I will be genuinely surprised if real servers with GPUs are launched.
I don’t mean to be facetious here. But saying “will” is treating it as inevitable that this will happen, which is how the grifters win.
It's great that this site drills down even further to demonstrate that there is absolutely no point at which the launch costs ever make this economical or viable, so I really don't understand what people are doing.
Especially because this site was harping for years about the cost of launches and putting things in to orbit, the whole reason why SpaceX got started and has grown as it has. As soon as that became an inconvenient number, we now just make things up (Just pretend that launch costs are 10% of what they actually are to get people to invest?).
I think datacentres in space are predicated on Starship bringing launch costs down. Way down.
https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
—
If I were to guess, my first bet would be grand PR damage control for all the Mexicans, Irish, and what have you as in “don’t worry, we’ll soon be in space and out of your backyard” (no, they won’t).
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/technology/ai-data-center...
The article makes this point, but it's relatively far in and I felt it was worth making again.
With that said, my employer now appears to be in this business, so I guess if there's money there, we can build the satellites. (Note: opinions my own) I just don't see how it makes sense from a practical technical perspective.
Space is a much harder place to run datacenters.
Let’s say you need 50m^2 solar panels to run it, then just a ton of surface area to dissipate. I’d love to be proven wrong but space data centers just seem like large 2d impact targets.
If it was just about cooling and power availability, you'd think people would be running giant solar+compute barges in international waters, but nobody is doing that. Even the "seasteading" guys from last decade.
These proposals, if serious, are just to avoid planning permission and land ownership difficulties. If unserious, it's simply to get attention. And we're talking about it, aren't we?
Solar panels have improved more than cooling technology since ISS was deployed, but the two are still on the same order of magnitude.
• No additional mass for liquid cooling loop infrastructure; likely needed but not included
• Thermal: only solar array area used as radiator; no dedicated radiator mass assumed
Now JWST is at near L2 but it is still in sunlight. It's solar-powered. There are a series of radiating layer to keep heat away from sensitive instruments. Then there's the solar panels themselves.
Obviously an orbital data center wouldn't need some extreme cooling but the key takeaway from me is that the solar panels themselves would shield much of the satellite from direct sunlight, by design.
Absent any external heating, there's only heating from computer chips. Any body in space will radiate away heat. You can make some more effective than others by increasing surface area per unit mass (I assume). Someone else mentioned thermoses as evidence of insulation. There's some truth to that but interestingly most of the heat lost from a thermos is from the same IR radiation that would be emitted by a satellite.
Putting data centers under water makes way way more sense than into space.
You need permits underwater. You don’t in space.
You've actually got more option to jurisdiction-shop with underwater data, but I'm not convinced that's the major issue with building datacentres anyway.
Ultimately there are latency and minimise data-transfer arguments for doing certain types of data processing on local machines in space, but the generalised compute and model-training argument only works if the unit economics stack up as sufficiently good to cover the risk and R&D, and they're not obviously favourable compared with cold place on earth with clear skies and access to cold water even assuming launch costs become minimal. (It's slightly amusing to see how much some advocates of that other controversial futurist vision of spaced-based solar power - whose chances of success equally depend on low launch costs - viscerally hate the latest wave of datacentres-in-space hype...)
FCC is easier to deal with than multiple layers of environmental, planning, power, and water concerns at the local, state and federal levels.
> they're not obviously favourable compared with cold place on earth with clear skies and access to cold water
There are fewer of those places that can be developed than there is space. The bottleneck to space is launch. The bottleneck on the ground is power.
I don’t think anyone thinks the math works right now. But as OP showed, it’s surprisingly proximate in a way SBSP is not.
If you get fed up of multiple layers of concerns and US specific bureaucracy, you simply move to a different country where a single authority is desperate to not only remove hurdles but might even give subsidies to someone that wants to employ lots of people to put up solar panels and give them a bit of surplus power and hot water. Chips and solar panels fit as easily in shipping containers as they do in spacecraft. The FCC actually has to handle the concerns of entities more concerned by the environmental impact of your megaconstellation because it's a 1km^2 wide missile travelling at 17,500 mph which much of the rest of the space industry is expected to expend propellant to evade where orbits intersect, which is a bit more concerning than 5km^2 of slightly less green fields and some question marks about water abstraction, and there aren't other authorities you can turn to. (Space is underregulated in terms of not having any practical traffic management beyond launch and spectrum licensing, but that's more risk rather than dream libertarian business opportunity; the FCC can still kibosh your project, you just won't get anyone clearing debris out your way)
Technically there is more space in space than Earth, but once you start factoring that convenient orbits for earth data transfer involve carving a high speed path which intersects with other spacecraft also moving at high speed and not all with as much control as they'd like it starts to look a lot less capacious. The Earth not about to run out of coastal regions with unbuilt land any time soon.
(SBSP has its own similar issues, of course)
(I agree right now it probably makes sense, but decades and centuries away we probably don't want to warm up earth anymore. If anything space datacenters could provide shade for earth lol.)
Seems like according to this analysis it all hinges on launch cost and satellite cost. This site's default for Starship launch cost is $500/kg, but SpaceX is targeting much lower than that, more like $100/kg and eventually optimistically $10/kg (the slider doesn't even go that low). At $100/kg (and assuming all the other assumptions made on the site hold) then you break even on cost vs. terrestrial if you can make the satellites for $7/watt (excluding GPUs, as the whole analysis does).
Have we seen any benefits to orbital computing by launching a cluster of raspberry pis to LEO? Surely this isn't an impossible task to test out on a smaller scale?
"Datacenters in space" make for a catchy narrative and an interesting demo, but the math simply doesn't work.
When considering factors like launch cost, maintenance complexity, and the cost of high-bandwidth communications (latency included), there is no realistic set of economic and engineering assumptions under which orbiting datacenters become cost-competitive with simply building conventional nuclear-powered (or renewable energy-powered) datacenters on the ground.
In fact we're off by 50-100x. Dramatic launch cost reductions still won't make it work. And of course if you invest a lot in specific lines of tech to make it work you then have to consider that the same can also be invested in better ground-based nuclear, bringing the cost of power down for everyone.
man who quotes big number - often made a fool
It is a nice talking point for the U.S. Saudi Investment Forum. The Saudis apparently buy anything:
I do wonder, at what factor of orbital to terrestrial cost factor it becomes worthwhile.
The greater the terrestrial lead time, red tape, permitting, regulations on Earth, the higher the orbital-to-terrestrial factor that's acceptable.
A lights-out automated production line pumping out GPU satellites into a daily Starship launch feels "cleaner" from an end-to-end automation perspective vs years long land acquisition, planning and environment approvals, construction.
More expensive, for sure, but feels way more copy-paste the factory, "linearly scalable" than physical construction.
You can set up plant manufacturing chips in shipping containers and sending them to wherever energy/land is cheapest and regulation most suitable, without having to seek the FCCs approval to get launch approved and your data back...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-YcVLq98Ew
The short of it is that cooling is likely the biggest problem, given you will need to pump the heat to the backside and radiate it away, and the amount of mass you will need to dedicate to cooling works against deployments and increases the cost per unit significantly. Not to mention, the idea of these huge deployments runs into potential space debris issues.
Whenever one of these ventures actually manages to launch a proof of concept, I think we'll be able to quickly discern if there is actually a near-future here.
> References: Gemini, Gemini, ChatGPT, ChatGPT, Gemini, ChatGPT, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini (There are sub-references from these services in the GitHub.)
I think, if you're going to make statements like this - especially from a position of expertise, you should be personally verifying the numbers and citing their sources directly. What good is asking the reader to trust an AI on your behalf? They should trust you.
(To be clear, I suspect the conclusions drawn are still correct.)
I'm going to assume there's tons of logical errors and oversights in the math, considering the author couldn't even be bothered to write the text of the post himself.
I suppose there are several other Oligarchs In Space stories and movies since then, but if the point of the space station is to host AI, that narrows it down a bit.
Or perhaps it's performative, designed to spook gullible politicians into changing laws to "keep" businesses that were never actually going to go somewhere else anyway.
It then occurred to me that they (all major AI companies) know all of these facts but still pushing for it so there must be another reason. Then I recalled the offhand statement from the openAI lady about govt backstop for infra, which was strongly opposed by public and AI czar. this might be be a backdoor way of injecting that backstop capital in terms of subsidies now for results in 5 years or so. and needless to say after pilot programs those will fail spectacularly.
The one glaring hole that I see is the challenge of moving the data to/from the datacenter while it's on orbit. Bandwidth to/from space isn't free. FCC/ITU licenses are required, transmitters/receiviers/modems/DSP/antennas all add to SWAP (size, weight, and power). Ground-stations are needed to move the data up/down, but those have recently become a commodity too. Still, they're not free. (see: https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station)
There is also the added latency between earth-based users and space-based datacenters, which may be a deal breaker for some applications.
Another issue I don't see covered are the significant differences between space-based hardware and terrestrial hardware. The space stuff needs to be radiation tolerant, and that usually makes it a lot slower and a lot more expensive than the terrestrial stuff, all other things being equal.
In the end, space-based datacenters are highly impractical even if you assume that Starship can put anything into orbit very cheaply.
But when I click on it, I get this error.
Failed to load shared conversation. Request is not allowed. Please try again later. (403, 9aebe525df75165e-BLR)
d_silin•7h ago
ikiris•7h ago
d_silin•7h ago
hooverd•7h ago
mlhpdx•7h ago
xgulfie•7h ago
compiler-guy•7h ago
At any rate, one basic communication's satellite worth of compute would be more than enough. No need for TPUs.
ViscountPenguin•1h ago
Figs•42m ago
echoangle•7h ago
d_silin•7h ago
ikiris•6h ago
Its like that scene at the end of Real Genius, "Maybe somebody already has a use for it, one for which it's perfectly designed." Lets look at the facts: Impossible to raid, not under any direct legal jurisdiction, high bandwidth line of sight communications options to satellite feed points that would be difficult to tap outside of other orbital actors, Power feed that is untethered to any planetary grid or at risk of terrestrial actors, etc.
echoangle•5h ago
ikiris•6h ago
d_silin•5h ago
hirsin•1h ago
ViscountPenguin•1h ago
hirsin•1h ago
CobrastanJorji•7h ago