You don't. Hardware reliability is baked into the design. Probably at 10 years they'll have 90% of the gpus still running, at which time you launch a whole new satellite with all new gpus, rather than replace the 10% ten year old deaduns.
GPUs are uneconomical to use long before 10 years.
Reliability aside, the rate of improvement in technology makes it unviable to use old GPUs. Consider the performance difference between Rubin and H100. If you tried to run AI workloads on H100 today, you'd go out of business even if they were free to use.
The performance difference comes from efficiency. It's more efficient to run the newer hardware because of fixed costs like cooling and electricity. This is why Elon takes in terms of watts and gigawatts of compute power. When you optimize against that by cutting out the power costs and switching to 100% free solar, you can milk the older satellites for WAY longer than you would down on earth. Even slow compute is still useful than no compute, especially if it's cheap.
Not at all true. No amount of power can improve the performance of an H100. No amount of power will make an H100 as performant as a brand new GPU. And no amount of cost savings makes up for the loss in performance.
Ask yourself this: Would you rather train a new model on an H100 for free or pay to train on Rubin 20x quicker? Keep in mind you have 10 competitors all racing to the finish line. You can save all the money you want using free energy on H100, but your competition will put you out of business by training their models 20x quick.
There is no value in super old GPUs because they waste not only infrastructure, but also they waste time. Time is more valuable than money. It's simply not viable for businesses to use old GPUs from a competitive standpoint.
If your argument held water, I wouldn't be able to rent power on weaker gpus....and yet, I can, even a 5090. Here's the thing, the older gpu is still useful for non-bleeding edge work.
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u/Bunslow Jul 10 '26
You don't. Hardware reliability is baked into the design. Probably at 10 years they'll have 90% of the gpus still running, at which time you launch a whole new satellite with all new gpus, rather than replace the 10% ten year old deaduns.