Elon should do I it. Really. Either we get to see what noone understands yet: How economically viable server cooling at scale in space looks like or we see Elon faceplant financially yet again.
Either way, we win.
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2026
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Vacuum does not vent heat.
This has been a PSA.
Vacuum does not vent heat.
my Dyson gets pretty warm.
Begrudging upvote
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Instead of shipping an entire data center to space, let's ship a single Elon instead.
This leaves more room for fish to thrive.
Just a reminder, while they speak of data centers in space, their proposed satellite is actually more like a single server rack in space.
It's always misleading, you can't even trust their choice of words.
Just confirming what I've suspected: the point of the space datacenter thing is to keep the tools of oppression out of reach of angry mobs with torches and pitchforks.
Data center in space: untouchable
Strictly necessary ground radio station to get any usable amount of data to and from said data center: still flammable
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Good thing the whole idea makes no sense, because repairs are impossible, you can only vent heat in infrared, you have to use expensive rockets to get them up there, and if they're in LEO, they'll fall back down to earth. Oh, and there's more likelyhood that bits get flipped from all of the high energy particles up there.
It'll just make LLMs at scale even more infeasible.
To run one rack of GPUs they will be about 100 square meters of solar panels and 30 square meters of radiators. That's about 130 kilowatts of compute power. To get a gigawatt multiply that by 6,000. Musk is claiming he wants to send terawatts up to there.
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Democrats immediately win three of the four seats on the Moon and sweep the Sky Council.
Please, waste your money on something that needs several football fields big heat radiators per gigawatt. And cannot replace a hard drive without launching a technician into space.
Easy, just tell the AI to change the harddrive!
He will do absolutely anything to not spend money on making the world he lives in a better place for all. So build a data center in space, just add a little apartment for yourself. Imagine looking down on the whole world! What power!
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An utterly unworkable, absurdly costly idea. I'm sure the same investor-lemmings who buy heavily into IPOs which have no viable business model will fall for this too.
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Keeping one rack of GPU running needs basically all the uninhabited parts of the international space station. That's roughly 100 kilowatt. That's 10.000 ISS sized installations, man's most expensive object ever made, for a gigawatt datacenter. I just hope he's forced to bankroll this personally
It's stupid on so many levels... yeah first and foremost basically everything about space is terrible for data centers.
What are the 3 things a data center needs.
Power, cooling, good internet connection. Obviously power is complicated as heck, yeah solar is a bit more direct, but also hits total blackouts when it winds up in the shadow of things... and shielding etc... from all the radiation is a pain and a half, solar pannels will need to be drastically bigger and heavier than their earth counterparts, which is expensive as hell to send up there.
but the harder part... cooling. People think of space as cold, but that's innacurate... there's no air to be cold... things stay at the temperature they are... if you have something constantly pumping out heat... it's insanely difficult to get the heat to radiate out.
Just read a comment about exactly this a few days ago. Anyone working on space components know that a very hat problem to work on is how to keep things cool because, well - having the fucking sun shine on things most of the time directly without the ozone layer and air to dissipate heat in and way does make things go hot.
Also, you forgot a very important thing a data center needs: people that work there. That is one of the reasons we currently build data centers so close to urban sprawls in Arizona instead of somewhere in the middle of Alaska or in polar regions. There must be personnel working onsite all the time.
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We can also launch Elmo into space and... Well, just forget about him, good riddance
Good luck dumbfuck, tell me how easy it is to service, maintain and repair them when you inevitably overheat them, or don't have the proper shielding so components burn out or degrade beyond useful parameters.
Mars is all red, maybe you want to restart those plans and take your flock of sheeple with you as soon as possible?
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Wow. He really is as dumb as I thought. As much as I would appreciate him investing the kind of money that would be required to orbit a viable data center into things humanity actually needs, I would also be perfectly happy witnessing him blow hundreds of billions on a fruitless project. Dumb shit doesn’t even understand basic physics and thermodynamics. It just demonstrates how he is an “ideas man” while actual smart people carry him on their shoulders. Wish he would just fuck off to mars already.
Wow. He really is as dumb as I thought.
He's a con artist.
Exactly. Once the data center in space idea inevitably flames out, he'll come up with some new bullshit "vision" that the rubes will lap up just as eagerly.
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While he's not smart enough to understand what a tough problem cooling servers in space would be, at least some of the engineers working on it might invent some interesting technology while failing to build a datacenter in space. Which is more than I can say about his other expenses like failing to buy elections, or failing to only have sons.
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lol let him waste his money on an impossible technology
He doesn't waste his money on his companies. He wastes tax payer funding on them. And when that started drying up, he took it to the stock market, convinced the exchange to fast track adding his company to being eligible for indexes, and then wasted our 401ks on it. He's the ultimate con man.
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Has anyone actually tried a genuine rollout of data centers? Eg no lying about bringing in jobs, no cheating the energy grid, no building loud data centers near homes, don't paint people as idiot luddites for opposing AI.
I wonder how different sentiments about data centers would be if the people building them weren't pathological. Probably not good, but having a punkass showman leading the way seems like self-sabotauge.
People have been building them normally for decades. They just used to be regular industrial buildings in industrial-zoned areas and required only minor grid upgrades.
The scale of the new stuff makes it pathological. You cant be a good guy if your hyperscaler is the size of a small town and uses as much power and water as a state.
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A data center in international waters is immensely more practical in most regards, if legal jurisdiction is your complaint.
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