Comment on Why put data centers in space?
cinoreus@lemmy.world 4 days agoI remember watching a real engineering video, the white paper for it doesn’t go into properly explaining the cooling mechanism. There were plenty of other problems too, but this alone was enough for me to know it’s running on pure hopium.
Oh and you cannot just use the corporate maths in this and not count initial costs, and costs of assembling the whole thing. Estimated area of solar panels for a datacenter of 4gw was 12.5km² assuming the best of the solar technologies used. The initial cost of putting it up there would be so high, it might even dwarf the lifetime operation cost.
In my opinion, it’s just another grift like hyperloop ko keep the AI bubble from popping.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
That video is very poor, for focusing on a red herring of trying to build a monolith 1gw datacenter in space. There is no plan for such. Instead a mesh of smaller (fits in 1 rocket) datacenters that each have their own solar/radiators auto deployed with the datacluster. Inference does not need fast networking between clusters as models fit in a single cluster easily.
It’s still completely uneconomic because even GPUs that survive 5 years, are worthless after 5 years. Plan is to trash the datacenters every 5 years including the solar and radiators.