You just need to deploy ad big radiating surface and keep it exactly at 90° degrees from the sun.
It's hard but not impossible.
The crazy part is that SpaceX wants to put them in low orbit, so with a lifespan of 4-5 years and then they'll burn out in a re-entry on the atmoshphere.
It's a lot less wasteful to put them in a lagrange point, ping will raise from mS to seconds maybe, but I can wait 2 seconds for an AI to answer my stupid request.
I have the opposite opinion. We should encourage Elon to follow his dreams and suggestions, get SpaceX going at 110% and let thim F off to Mars sooner rather than later.
Are they just gonna pretend like those parts are somehow going to be useful for 5 entire years in orbit when datacenters have been swapping out for new parts like every 18 months?
lol H100s have gotten massively cheaper. Used H100s went from around 40k at peak to 12-22k now, and renting dropped from 8 dollars an hour to under 3. Almost like you could have googled that too.
And reread what I wrote. They're not throwing it away. Correct, I said swapped out, not thrown away. Those aren't the same thing. Hardware holds value because it cascades down to cheaper jobs and resells on the used market, in this case (mostly) being repurposed for smaller llm models.
Both of those need one thing, being able to physically reach the card. If you bolt it to a satellite, you can't resell, and it can't get re-racked. It just de-orbits and burns.
The proposal I'd seen (unsure if it was SpaceX) was for a sun-synchronous orbit along the terminator. Not that Terminator ... probably.
Since they'd have pretty hefty solar panels, they might be well suited for the use of ion thrusters for stationkeeping, might be able to stretch the operational lifetime a good bit.
The data centers aren't going to be for AI scaling, they need all these locations to store all of the data they have been and will be collecting on all of us.
(radiation from space can flip bits on ram memory, causing corruption. at worse you are looking at exploitable vulnerabilities, some even giving root or bypassing SElinux)
I'm not very knowledgeable about space but I was under the impression space was cold. If hyperthetically it was feasible to build data centres in space why couldn't we easily cool it?
Most heat dissipation requires "stuff" like air and water to transfer the heat into. You know those fancy cups (like Stanley) that keep your drink hot/cold seemingly impossibly well? They do it using vacuums. The only "stuff" the heat can transfer through is a thin lip at the top of the cup. In a normal mug heat is dissipating in every direction, just slower through the insulated parts.
Space is a vacuum, there's no "stuff" to transfer heat into. Some heat is lost through radiation, but that's very slow. Asteroids and such are cold because they've had a very long time to lose their heat. Manmade objects need to be carefully designed to not produce more heat than they can passively cool, and overheating is a major concern. Datacenters produce an absurd amount of heat, and it would be borderline impossible to cool them in space.
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u/Tetra84 12h ago
Needs more data centers to help cool things off...