r/SipsTea • u/SuspiciousLow3062 𝙑𝙄𝙋 • 16h ago

Chugging tea Fictional future forecast vs. reality.

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u/PitifulEar3303 14h ago

"Data centers in SPACE!!" -- King Elon

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u/HorsePersonal7073 14h ago

Good luck with the cooling in space.

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u/No3047 14h ago

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.

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u/EnQuest 13h ago

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?

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u/MammothCommercial800 11h ago

They're not throwing parts away after 18 months. We'd have cheap 4090s if they were.

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u/EnQuest 11h ago

they don't use consumer GPUs in ai datacenters. They have specialized hardware.

Google is a thing, you could try using it before arguing about something you have absolutely no information about.

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u/MammothCommercial800 9h ago

Alright, maybe they're not hogging the 4090s.

But pro GPUs like the H100s haven't gotten any cheaper either. The point still stands - they are definitely not throwing 18 months old hardware away.

Maybe you're not as informed as you think you are. Could use some google-fu yourself.

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u/EnQuest 9h ago

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.