They state that in 10 years all data centers will be in outer space. I state that in 10 years we will look back and think this was a ridiculous idea. The meta and maintenance costs, the pollution of sending them to space, the space pollution itself, the outer space radiation, the extra redundant error correction needed*,* and much more all speak against this. Why not throw that trillion dollars into optical computing chip research? Why not create better sustainable methods here on earth*?* We could run a single data center down here, or pay a million times moreto do this in space. The argument that we are polluting Earth down here is very weak. Yes, we do, but why on earth do we then not invest more in research for solving these problems*?* There are startups out there that will one day solve these issues. And then space data centers will be something for the Star Trek age, which humanity will probably never achieve.
> In 10 years, nearly all new data centers will be being built in outer space,” Johnston predicts.
Can I bet on the contrary odds? Could throw down my whole retirement with confidence
One of the selling points they mention is that they won't need to use any fresh water for cooling.
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?
>Starcloud’s space-based data centers can use the vacuum of deep space as an infinite heat sink.
The famously heat conductive vacuum...
Someone fedex a vacuum flask full of hot coffee to nvidia HQ with an explanatory note.
Altman: has stake in nuclear power and AI companies
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
Shameful to see this on Nvidia's site. They have real engineers and business prowess. This is really shaking my assumptions about the company.
Apart from getting 16 sq. km of solar arrays and radiators into orbit - and without jumping to conclusions about whether this is a borderline scam - I can imagine 2 obvious showstoppers:
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.
We've officially lost the plot, we will now ship our AI data centers to ~space~ ... This will not work with modern technology.
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.
Their numbers strike me as very optimistic:
*Table 1. Cost comparison of a single 40 MW cluster operated for 10 years in space vs on land.*
| Cost Item | Terrestrial | Space
|:------------------------------|:--------------------------------|:----------------
| Energy (10 years) | $140m @ $0.04 per kWh | $2m cost of solar array
| Launch | None | $5m (single launch of compute module, solar & radiators)
| Cooling (chiller energy cost) | $7m @ 5% of overall power usage | More efficient cooling architecture taking advantage of higher ΔT in space
| Water usage | 1.7m tons @ 0.5L/kWh | Not required
| Enclosure (Sat. Bus/Building) | Approximately equivalent cost | Approximately equivalent cost
| Backup power supply | $20m | Not required
| All other DC hardware | Approximately equivalent cost | Approximately equivalent cost
| Radiation shielding | Not required | $1.2m @ 1 kg of shielding per kW of compute and $30/kg launch cost
| Cost Balance | $167m | $8.2m
Actual engineering question. How large can you scale a cooling system in space? And I mean say from radial central point. Surely at some point it just doesn't work anymore. Or you spend more energy to get energy to point where you can radiate it away than you can radiate.
So many questions, like how would you protect from bit flips, damage to circuits. "10x lower energy costs and reduce the need for energy consumption on Earth." I am not sure if we need a rocket scientist to calculate the energy costs of manufacturing and sending a rocket to outer space versus putting that fuel into a generator and just letting it run. What happens when the servers need to retire due to some unpatchable bug
> “In space, you get almost unlimited, low-cost renewable energy,”
Wouldn't you know, you COULD get the same energy here too.
So many questions to be asked, I don't know where to start. What's the upside of bunching up all the servers into a single megastructure rather than separate satellites?
The rate of radiative cooling scales proportionally to (T^4-Tenv^4) which approximates to just T^4 in space (Tenv = 3K). The hotter they can run it, the smaller heatsinks they need; for every doubling of temperature, the heatsink area can be reduced by a factor of 16. Also, it might be possible to boost the output temperature, e.g. with a chemical heat pump for even smaller heat sinks.
How is a multiple square-kilometer radiator not just an inevitable Kessler syndrome disaster?
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.
I'm by no means closer or educated enough on astrophysics or anything to do with space. Hence I have a very "commoner" question:
- asteroids? Debris? It's there even any risk of anything significantly big to be damaged by something flying by?
"About once a year, an automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth’s atmosphere, creates an impressive fireball, and burns up before reaching the surface."
I assume a good old "Prius" might have opinions about such construction of it flies through it.
But I guess "space is big", risks are low?
https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/asteroid-fast-fa...
You'll never be able to do maintenance or upgrade these things. The up front cost seems extremely high given the risk of hardware failure or obselecence at data center scales.
> Starcloud plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with super-large solar and cooling panels approximately 4 kilometers in width and length.
That is...very, very large.
Oh, cool... I have only one question (that is not cool at all): how are they about to exhaust 5GW of waste heat?
I have yet to meet a hardware engineer who thinks this is a good idea. I'm REALLY struggling to see benefits.
I've barely started reading the post, but
> “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.
This is a super basic question, how do they prevent the panels from being hit my space debris or rocks, floaties etc?
Is it just that within its orbit there are next to no objects it could collide with, even small ones?
If this math added up, wouldn't solar panels and radiators on earth solve the same problem?
I could see gov imaging satellites with a direct encrypted laser communications to GPU’s in orbit being attractive. Images processing, movement pattern analysis, multi spectral, and as they mentioned radar.
It’s more of a building the solution first and then look for the problem because why the heck not.
I though that refrigerating things in space was using a lot of energy because heat cannot dissipate in the void of space.
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 ?
So when a storage device or a GPU burns out, how do you replace it?
Fly an astronaut to space..?
Replacing faulty nodes or equipment in space seems totally reasonable... It's not like getting faulty drives replaced in my datacenter racks don't already take weeks/months...
Even if the some how solved the cooling problem others mentioned.
What happens when this data center becomes obsolete? we've just got a 4km wide piece of junk floating above earth now?
I have had people point out that building a Dyson sphere is pretty much a dumb idea, and there's no concievable reason why we would build one even if we could.
Now we have one - venture capital.
This cannot possibly end well (flipped bits, maintenance, cooling).
If they fulfill their promise within 10 years I'll change careers to kiwi farming. I promise.
Basic datacenter technicians will be the new astronauts, swapping burnt CPUs and failed hard drives in space.
Thats a ridiculous amount of solar pannels to send up. I don't really think this is going to work/be viable
If they send billions of dollars of GPU cards into space, how are they going to secure it, physically?
Would this not only work if there are solar arrays always catching the sun while the gpus are never in the sun?
„plans to build“
So far, it’s just a dream that convinced some investors to part with their money.
The prelude of a Dyson Sphere!
Strange their rendering is not exactly starship but its starship.
It really feels like I'm living in the future, lately.
I want that type of money for playing out something which can be pre calculated and is just not a smart idea at the moment at all.
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.
Wow, this is embarrassing. Hard to read.
What a scam
“The only cost on the environment will be on the launch, then there will be 10x carbon-dioxide savings over the life of the data center”
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.
crazy how tiny the servers are compared to the panels
Uhm, isn't radiation a problem outside of the atmosphere? How fast are the data transfers going to be? so many questions...
btw. this is dishonest regarding sustainability.
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...
We have officially "jumped the shark." If this had been posted on April 1st I would have laughed at this and said "great joke guys."
Cooling will be a real bitch.
Shielding also.
And latency.
I still like Keith Lofstrom's Server Sky concept.
Would it be more cost effective and more sustainable to heavily invest in graphene semiconductors than space-based datacenters? Is that a false dilemma?
Aren't there advantages to fabricating GO Graphene Oxide and CNT Carbon Nanotubes in microgravity?
“The only energy is the launch”, that’s false.
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.
Engineer call out for diskswap
They really don't want to let this bubble pop, do they?
This is absolute nonsense.
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…
All these calculations (of feasibility and maintenance challenges) are fascinating, but really just silly.
Of course we are going to use AI and robots, like AI robots, and stuff. It's going to be fully self-operating and the future!
But more seriously, thanks for great learning experiences about space to HN commenters.
pipe dream. this isnt going to happen before the AI bubble pops. Then when it does there wont be a drive for it.
It's going to be fun constantly repairing all those solar arrays. We'll be destroying our planet with the rocket launches alone. But hey! The more ridiculous the idea, the greater the chance that Trump and his conspiracy-laden circle will embrace it. It works in science fiction movies and novels, why not in reality, duh. /s
Everyone who puts up a persistent bright dot in the night sky should compensate everyone who has to see it with 1 cent for the sensory pollution.
Last time these folks were mentioned on HN, there was a lot of skepticism that this is really possible to do. The issue is cooling: in space, you can't rely on convection or conduction to do passive cooling, so you can only radiate away heat. However, the radiator would need to be several kilometers big to provide enough cooling, and obviously launching such a large object into space would therefore eat up any cost savings from the "free" solar power.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43977188