this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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They already run AMD chips on starlink, so they've figured out someway to shield them in most cases. Some solar flares at bad times (something about while raising orbits) has nuked some dishes before.
Its probably cheaper to account for some expected losses, than shield them perfectly.
They're shielded by being in a very low orbit. I don't think that would work for a data center.
These are also going to be in a low orbit so they have good latency
Im pretty sure they are shielded as I think I have seen stuff like that for the electronics in the iss. Thing is that the eletronics in sattelites and the space station are pretty small relative to datacenters. The only benefit I can really see is maybe they can be solar powered which I guess if the panel acts as shielding and stays sun facing but all the extra expense of getting it up there. I just don't see it as practical. I mean technically it should either work or not basedo on cost as long as they don't wring out any subudies or soemthing.
I think everyone is really confusing what these datacenters are.
They aren't these massive things. They're going to be a little bigger than v3 starlinks all working together in some manner. The best estiamte we have on size is v3 is 20kW of power, and these will be ~100kW
Edit: also power doesnt necessarily mean size. The GPUs will put off more heat per size i bet than whatever is in starlink, and even if it 5x'd the size of the computing area of the dish compared to starlink, that's still tiny. It's the radiator that will take up the space, not the datacenter portion.
ugh so we are talking massive constellations. That is so much worse.
Ya its going to be massive, I imagine larger than starlink if these dreams come true.