I remember another hacker news commentator describing these orbital data centers as a obviously bad idea to the point where any investments into that technology are incomprehensible. I share that sentiment, is there something I'm missing?
The point is to take the money, you see. It's the idiots who give it (which will involve looting the federal government for years to come) who will be screwed, not the guys running the scam. This should be evident after AI now. The entire industry is a narrative manufacturing machine aimed at separating investors from their money. That's all there is to it.
Some investments seem to be specifically crafted to attract people who do not understand X, where X is physics, or economics, biology, math, etc. And then giving in to greed and gambling is more fun than consulting an expert.
I wonder how many of these apparent start-up scams turned out to have genuine value.
> Washington-based Starcloud launched a satellite with an Nvidia H100 graphics processing unit in early November
An. That's not a datacenter, that's a server.
> Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston told CNBC that the company’s orbital data centers will have 10 times lower energy costs than terrestrial data centers.
> “Anything you can do in a terrestrial data center, I’m expecting to be able to be done in space. And the reason we would do it is purely because of the constraints we’re facing on energy terrestrially,” Johnston said in an interview.
Does that include lifting acres of solar panels into orbit?
If this takes off (no pun intended), maybe we'll get to deal with fun future problems like AI data centers blotting out the sun.
That's not even a server, that's a GPU. There's often 2-4 H100 cards per 1U of server, so a 4U server could have 8 of those. This whole satellite hosts something like 1/168th of a rack of compute, and the GPU only causes only about 100W of heat.
So using Stefan-Boltzmann equation if you have a 1m^2 surface at 100C you can radiate about 1kW from that surface -- assuming both sides radiate that, then lets assume it is double. Assume each blackwell chip + support electronics etc needs about 2kW of power to run. So each 1sq meter of say a copper plate is needed to cool 1 blackwell chip. So if you have some way to make some massive radiators that are basically giant plates spanning thousands of square meters, then you should be good. the Stefan-Boltzmann equation is proportional to the 4th power of T (in kelvin), so if you can somehow manage to use a heat pump for the heat from the GPU's into your heat sink such that you could run your radiators at a much hotter temperature, then the blackbody radiation that they put out dramatically goes up. So cooling is quite challenging but not impossible. (I also neglected importantly that you would need to use the giant solar panels as a sun shade for these radiators otherwise they would be pulling in heat from the sun)
For power, you need to somehow manage to generate all of the power that you would need to cool. So the most logical would be some huge solar panels -- assuming you could use similar tech to the space station, you can get aroudnd 100kW from those solar panels -- assume you can do say 10X better somehow, then now you have 1MW of power.
Unclear what the goal here is -- if the idea was doing this for cost, it sounds super unlikely to pan out -- if they want to put a datacenter in space such that nobody can tell somebody what to do, it would seem just as easy to go hide a datacenter in some random far flung corner of the world in a bunker. Seems just like a great way to light some money on fire.
Note all of this is mass that currently needs to be launched from Earth at significant cost - it is indeed nice this cost if finally going down thanks to partial launcher reusability (and hopefully full reusability soon as well) but I really don't see this making any economical sense unless a lot of this mass eventually comes from in situ resources you don't need to lift to orbit.
Also about the radiators - ideally they should radiate into empty space. If there is something in the way, like parts of your station or other radiators, then it will heat up - reducing effectiveness (you will have to remove this heat again) or even making stuff overheat.
At least I don't think you can realistically overheat the Sun. :-)
But I guess if you make the radiators reflective and hot enough they should still work to a even at Earths orbit in full sunlight ? Well, this is already in a "calculation needed" territor.
probably something like a stirling engine + working fluid going down tubes in the plate, it becomes worth it to develop silicon-on-insulator GPUs and other weird technologies that run at higher temps
Yea I’m super curious if you could build a heat pump to move the heat from the 100C GPUs to concentrate all of the heat into a blazingly hot radiator — and how well that would actually work.
“ Anything you can do in a terrestrial data center, I’m expecting to be able to be done in space,” Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston told CNBC.”
In theory, yes. But this cannot possibly be economical.
Any idea how much solar panels you’d need to power an entire data centre from space?
And how insanely much space you need for radiating away heat? There is no conduction or convection, so I’d love to see them try, and make this economically viable.
Beyond that what about protecting against latch-ups and bit flips due to radiation? The environment is significantly worse in space so short term faults and long term damage should be a concern. There's a reason why radiation hardened hardware uses chips with really large features.
Yeah I was wondering about that too, the far-greater exposure to radiation... I don't know anything about how well-mitigated that is these days, but I'm sure it's a huge factor they would have in mind?
Microsoft gave up on underwater data centers after trail run. I suspect it also was uneconomical. Easier cooling doesn't help that much when servers are inaccessible for maintenance.
I remember another hacker news commentator describing these orbital data centers as a obviously bad idea to the point where any investments into that technology are incomprehensible. I share that sentiment, is there something I'm missing?
The point is to take the money, you see. It's the idiots who give it (which will involve looting the federal government for years to come) who will be screwed, not the guys running the scam. This should be evident after AI now. The entire industry is a narrative manufacturing machine aimed at separating investors from their money. That's all there is to it.
Some investments seem to be specifically crafted to attract people who do not understand X, where X is physics, or economics, biology, math, etc. And then giving in to greed and gambling is more fun than consulting an expert.
I wonder how many of these apparent start-up scams turned out to have genuine value.
It is all marketing stunts now. Make yourself look innovative to pump up the valuation that you can then dump.
nope, tis ordinary goldrush hijinx
Even after a global disaster, it's still there.
No idea how it could help, but.. it's a reason
> Even after a global disaster, it's still there.
> No idea how it could help, but.. it's a reason
With AI, the reason only needs to look as good as a six-fingered hand.
so easy to capture by aliens
> Even after a global disaster, it's still there.
Ever heard of anti satellite weapons ? /s
The great Scott Manley did a video about that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-YcVLq98Ew
basically it doesn't make sense with current technologiesa and even with Starship's proposed specs/price it won't be profitable.
Check it out...
> Washington-based Starcloud launched a satellite with an Nvidia H100 graphics processing unit in early November
An. That's not a datacenter, that's a server.
> Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston told CNBC that the company’s orbital data centers will have 10 times lower energy costs than terrestrial data centers.
> “Anything you can do in a terrestrial data center, I’m expecting to be able to be done in space. And the reason we would do it is purely because of the constraints we’re facing on energy terrestrially,” Johnston said in an interview.
Does that include lifting acres of solar panels into orbit?
If this takes off (no pun intended), maybe we'll get to deal with fun future problems like AI data centers blotting out the sun.
That's not even a server, that's a GPU. There's often 2-4 H100 cards per 1U of server, so a 4U server could have 8 of those. This whole satellite hosts something like 1/168th of a rack of compute, and the GPU only causes only about 100W of heat.
They've run out of terrestrial snake oil to sell so they now need interstellar snake oil.
So using Stefan-Boltzmann equation if you have a 1m^2 surface at 100C you can radiate about 1kW from that surface -- assuming both sides radiate that, then lets assume it is double. Assume each blackwell chip + support electronics etc needs about 2kW of power to run. So each 1sq meter of say a copper plate is needed to cool 1 blackwell chip. So if you have some way to make some massive radiators that are basically giant plates spanning thousands of square meters, then you should be good. the Stefan-Boltzmann equation is proportional to the 4th power of T (in kelvin), so if you can somehow manage to use a heat pump for the heat from the GPU's into your heat sink such that you could run your radiators at a much hotter temperature, then the blackbody radiation that they put out dramatically goes up. So cooling is quite challenging but not impossible. (I also neglected importantly that you would need to use the giant solar panels as a sun shade for these radiators otherwise they would be pulling in heat from the sun)
For power, you need to somehow manage to generate all of the power that you would need to cool. So the most logical would be some huge solar panels -- assuming you could use similar tech to the space station, you can get aroudnd 100kW from those solar panels -- assume you can do say 10X better somehow, then now you have 1MW of power.
Unclear what the goal here is -- if the idea was doing this for cost, it sounds super unlikely to pan out -- if they want to put a datacenter in space such that nobody can tell somebody what to do, it would seem just as easy to go hide a datacenter in some random far flung corner of the world in a bunker. Seems just like a great way to light some money on fire.
there is no far flung corners of the world left for same reasons tanks are obsolete in modern warfare
Note all of this is mass that currently needs to be launched from Earth at significant cost - it is indeed nice this cost if finally going down thanks to partial launcher reusability (and hopefully full reusability soon as well) but I really don't see this making any economical sense unless a lot of this mass eventually comes from in situ resources you don't need to lift to orbit.
Also about the radiators - ideally they should radiate into empty space. If there is something in the way, like parts of your station or other radiators, then it will heat up - reducing effectiveness (you will have to remove this heat again) or even making stuff overheat.
> If there is something in the way, like parts of your station or other radiators,
or, the sun ...
At least I don't think you can realistically overheat the Sun. :-)
But I guess if you make the radiators reflective and hot enough they should still work to a even at Earths orbit in full sunlight ? Well, this is already in a "calculation needed" territor.
> Seems just like a great way to light some money on fire.
The key point is burning someone else's money, while pocketing a fraction of it. AI hype has made VCs stupid.
probably something like a stirling engine + working fluid going down tubes in the plate, it becomes worth it to develop silicon-on-insulator GPUs and other weird technologies that run at higher temps
Yea I’m super curious if you could build a heat pump to move the heat from the 100C GPUs to concentrate all of the heat into a blazingly hot radiator — and how well that would actually work.
Anatoly Cherdenko would be terrified.
“ Anything you can do in a terrestrial data center, I’m expecting to be able to be done in space,” Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston told CNBC.”
In theory, yes. But this cannot possibly be economical.
Any idea how much solar panels you’d need to power an entire data centre from space?
And how insanely much space you need for radiating away heat? There is no conduction or convection, so I’d love to see them try, and make this economically viable.
Beyond that what about protecting against latch-ups and bit flips due to radiation? The environment is significantly worse in space so short term faults and long term damage should be a concern. There's a reason why radiation hardened hardware uses chips with really large features.
Yeah I was wondering about that too, the far-greater exposure to radiation... I don't know anything about how well-mitigated that is these days, but I'm sure it's a huge factor they would have in mind?
The resulting LLMs will have space-brain-bit-rot.
I have an internet subscription for comments like this. Thanks for making my monday morning.
Microsoft gave up on underwater data centers after trail run. I suspect it also was uneconomical. Easier cooling doesn't help that much when servers are inaccessible for maintenance.
So, AI is now officially rocket science.
Anyways... This is dumb.
Radiation shielding, power, cooling, maintenance. All unnecessarily made more complex.
What for?