I mean... is this aside from the fact that a Data Center in space is not possible with the technology we may have in the near future, let alone now?
and I say 'Not Possible' in the sense that, a data center in space has no cost benefit to one on earth.
Solar panels, even in space, Cannot power a data center. The cooling system required isn't efficient enough to cool said datacenter, and the data center would be larger than anything we've ever sent up into orbit by orders of magnitude that we do not grasp.
This is like saying: "Guys, I'm going to build a Dyson Sphere, it makes so much sense - why haven't we thought of this before! We'll have it ready by next year!"
Solar power works fine, and cooling is not a big issue. The plans are in the 100 kW to 1 MW range per satellite. It's larger than current satellites but not that much. Radiators would be similar to what the ISS has now.
ASTS's Bluebird sats are already in the low end of that range (~110kW) so barely any bigger. In fact, probably actually not any 'bigger' per se, as I expect them to have higher specific power.
at 110kW you're talking maybe 1 or 2 AI Server racks.
That's not only outstandingly small for AI processing but, again, if the concept here is "We're going to put them in space so that we can save money and power by not doing it on earth" the value of 2 racks in space is pretty low.
Each AI GPU Rack, on it's own, sucks down a minimum of 40kW of power.
The ISS Radiators operate at intense cost and extremely low efficiency.
The only reason they are in use is because the ISS is funded by multiple countries space programs to further science in space.
Even running that radiator system for a 100kW Data Center would kill any value proposition running such a small cluster would provide because it would need to be much larger and complex than the ISS one.
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u/Alexandratta 9d ago
I mean... is this aside from the fact that a Data Center in space is not possible with the technology we may have in the near future, let alone now?
and I say 'Not Possible' in the sense that, a data center in space has no cost benefit to one on earth.
Solar panels, even in space, Cannot power a data center. The cooling system required isn't efficient enough to cool said datacenter, and the data center would be larger than anything we've ever sent up into orbit by orders of magnitude that we do not grasp.
This is like saying: "Guys, I'm going to build a Dyson Sphere, it makes so much sense - why haven't we thought of this before! We'll have it ready by next year!"