this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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They aren't making a datacenter like on earth. They're putting up a ton of satellites that will each generate about 100kW.
Everyone keeps thinking they're putting these massive things up there, they are not doing that.
Edit: Oh I missed your tool this time was a real calculator this time, thank you! That says 127 square meters, with black body, 70c and 1 (but no idea if those are good values)
That’s interesting, but what’s the point? If it’s like 2 DGX boxes in each satellite, spaced out, the interconnect between them is going to be very slow, and the individual computational power of each satellite will not be that impressive.
And if you connect them all in one constructed mesh and wire them together, well, you’ve made a 200MW datacenter! The economies remain the same.
If hardware gets more power efficient, well… Then why do you need to go to space anymore?
To put into perspective, each satellite that could only accommodate, at most, 2-3 servers would have a power and cooling burden greater than the entire international space station. For each 2-3 server unit, you have an ISS-magnitude power and cooling challenge. They would be looking to have hundreds of thousands of ISS-scale satellites in orbit....
Ya, the economies of how much total space / material for the global network is similar, although lets say higher due to losses in efficiency in distributing it over so many dishes, but in terms of how big any individual radiator is and how much space each one is going to take, the smaller sizes make it easier to manage. Trying to figure out a 150-200m^2^ ~~solar~~ ~~panel~~ radiator is a lot easier than trying to figure out a 1km^2^
The individual power of each satellite having to use a mesh network to train might not be fast enough, maybe they'll still use land based ones for training, but no single person needs more compute than what a satellite can provide. So from the inference / customer computation side of things, it isn't a problem.
edit: I meant radiator, not solar panel
edit: looks like blackwells can run sunstained at 88c, so that will help a bit more as well on size, the calculator now says 103m^2^ instead of 127m^2
Not necessarily. There are inference schemes where spreading MoE models across 40+ GPUs with a fast interconnect yields better efficiency.
The coolant still needs to remain relatively cool to hold that silicon temperature, though. Practically it can't be like 60C.
Ah, ya that makes sense, whatever the numbers the the chip can be the coolant will be less.