this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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[–] DupaCycki@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago

Other people have already explained the topic in sufficient detail, so I'll just leave a quote from a former NASA engineer and a link to their article.

Taking the NVIDIA H200 as a reference, the per-GPU-device power requirements are on the order of 0.7kW per chip. These won't work on their own, and power conversion isn't 100% efficient, so in practice 1kW per GPU might be a better baseline. A huge, ISS-sized, array could therefore power roughly 200 GPUs. This sounds like a lot, but lets keep some perspective: OpenAI's upcoming Norway datacenter is intending to house 100,000 GPUs, probably each more power hungry than the H200. To equal this capacity, you'd need to launch 500 ISS-sized satellites. In contrast, a single server rack (as sold by NVIDIA preconfigured) will house 72 GPUs, so each monster satellite is only equivalent to roughly three racks.

Source: Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.