LOL LOL you CANNOT cool something like that in space. The entire concept is flawed.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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Sadly the latency involved in transmitting and receiving from orbit makes many terrestrial applications fail... The speed of light is a fixed constant.
When gaming, we can always see the idiots running on starlink...the lag is visible and makes them sitting ducks.. ;-)
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You could put em on the moon with a heatpump into the ground.
The cost per pound to get them there is insane.
They are seriously old in 2 years.
They could put them in deserts here with closed loop cooling.
or... hear me out... Maybe we DON'T NEED THAT MUCH AI....
You could put em on the moon with a heatpump into the ground.
The interior of the moon is not super cold. You could still run a heat pump, but I don't know what the conductivity is like.
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Anybody Who Thinks Orbital Data Centers are a Good Idea ~~Is Suffering from AI Psychosis, Experts Argue~~ Doesn't Understand Basic Physics
Two main problems with data centers. Power and cooling. In space the power is doable. The cooling is a major pain in the ass and always has been. There are only three ways to get rid of heat. Conduction, convection, and radiation. The first two don’t work because of the vacuum thing. The third is horribly inefficient. Just look at the ISS and the giant fins that only dumps about 70 kW of waste heat through radiator “wings” that weigh several tons. A single rack in a high density compute rack can generate 100kW by itself.
So yeah given the expensive and how inefficient it is, it’s a terrible idea.
Edit: I’m a system architect so dealing with data center heat is something I’m familiar with.
they are trying ti in the ocean, they have to deal with corrosion , animals gettin encrusted on the surfaces, plus transportation and logistics.
Yeah but space is cold. Just put the hotness out into space and it'll freeze just like in the movies.
/s
Send it to a cold moon like Europa. Free cooling, plus A.I. is kept at a safe distance
Ummm….
“All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there.” - Arthur C. Clarke 2010
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You're just too small minded to comprehend the grand vision of business genius™ Elon Musk!
And Bezos apparently…
These chucklefucks are just trying to get some sucker… er I mean investor to fund the whole thing so their respective space companies can do the job.
And after doing to some very cursorary research other issues like…
- Radiation and reliability - apparently cosmic radiation is a bitch
- Lifecycle costs - I should have thought about this one. It's not like when a drive dies in space you just drive down to the DC to replace it. And not mention we recycle out compute about every 5-6 years or so.
- Connection - somebody mention this already in the thread but yeah you ain't hanging a fiber cable to a satellite
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There's also the very real problem of data transfer.
On land you just lay down another fiber optic cable and you can double your data transfer rate.
In space, you have to deal with cross talk and interference on a limited spectrum.
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Or they are just ignorant of how heat dissipation and vacuums work.
It's literally just taking the piss out of idiotic investors. Data Centers, AI, space, new frontier, new markets. It checks all the boxes to get idiots excited to dump money into your tech company so people keep talking about it because talking about it is what gets results. Hopefully nobody is dumb enough to actually try it, it's an absolute scam.
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Eliminating heat is like one of the hardest space problems 🦙
Space being "cold" doesn't matter since vacuum INSULATES.
it's not even cold...! The matter that DOES exist in it is very hot plasma but it's just really thinly spread out.
This is what I’ve been tearing my hair out over any time this comes up. If you put a computer in space it will heat up until it achieves incandescence. Which is bad for the performance.
I don't have a good grasp on what technology exists for space, but I would assume that radiators of some sort would be possible. Not in the conventional way that they ineract with a medium to release heat, but instead that the radiators emit heated particles - kind of in the same way that water evaporates without boiling. With that being said, I have no idea what efficiency that would operate under, and I have no idea if such a radiator would be used up fast. It sounds like a terrible idea, but I don't posess the facts.
Some people don't believe in space travel because there is no air to push against in the way that jet engines work. But they fail to understand that space travel operates under other ways to generate force. I just don't want to end up in the same sort of argument as them, believing that it's not possible to cool down machines in space just because there is no medium for conventional cooling.
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SpaceX IPO happened to keep xAi afloat.
Servers in space topic exist because of this very reason.
It is a non subject
Yea honestly, orbital data centers are the dumbest shit I've heard during this bubble, and a huge indication of peak bubble hype.
The bubble is like this at this point:
Orbital data centers are a good idea if one wants to get massive golden parachutes that siphon money from all the investor cash that the entirely u realistic promises brings in. They are a grift that will most likely benefit Musk in the same way all his other pie int he sky bullshit does.
Being technically terrible hasn't really stopped that from happening with his other bullshit projects.
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The advantage of datacenters in space is that the peasants can't break in and sabotage your equipment. Only a very small set of nations would have the capability of blowing it up or somehow jamming its communications.
It literally only makes sense if you're a billionaire worried about the growing unpopularity of your AI datacenters, or you're using it for war and don't want it easily bombed...
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I've been working on IT for quite a while now and the only certain thing on this business is that hardware breaks down. All of it. Only questions are 'when' and 'how'. I'm pretty sure you can't get NBD support to the orbit. And I'd guess that shaking the shit out of the hardware during launch won't really help.
And that's of course just a minor detail, the whole idea is so stupid on a very fundamental level that I don't know why it's even a news worthy.
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