Datacenters in space aren't going to work

It can be considered as advertising. Like Coca-Cola. Not actually anything new or real most of the time. But keeping the mind-share. Making the company seem like they are on cutting-edge, visionary and futuristic. After all the scam is build on future promises. And not the current day real profits.

I always assume, unfortunately, that once companies start to get to a certain point they become strategic, and military applications comes into play. They then probably get special consideration when it comes to funding and access. All of Musk's efforts certainly fit this paradigm.

Elon is 100% planning to put significant ai compute in space. He is probably planning to do it in a decentralized way.

He has the launch platform (spacex), he has the existing power and data infrastructure (starlink), he has the demand side. (Xai)

Will he succeed? That is different question. Is it possible to add enough power generation and thermal radiative capacity to starlink nodes to bother? Don’t know, but an analysis that fails to answer those two specific engineering questions is useless.

Many of the dumb ideas being hyped in this AI bubble make sense viewed through this lens.

Data centres stirring up opposition? Sell a sci-fi vision that you will move them to Space! And reassure your over-extended investors that the data centre buildout rush you’re committing to isn’t going to get bogged down in protests and lawsuits.

The people hyping this stuff are not stupid, just their real goal (make as much money as possible as quickly as possible) has only a vague relationship to what they claim to be doing.

It makes the same amount of sense as a colony on Mars, largely for the same reasons.

Sure you can put people underground, but that’s probably not much fun. Why not just do that on earth?

Consider what it costs to lift material to orbit. How can it possibly make sense except as a science fair project?

The only real advantage is 24/7 power without having to use batteries (or some other power supply at night or when cloudy). The way solar prices are going the problem of suppling power when the sun isn’t visible is a real bottleneck.

Much like oil companies crowing about their carbon capture or oil from algae projects.

Space datacenters have the dual-use of tracking and weapons targeting which is needed for a robust Golden Dome architecture (immune to comm link jamming, terabit image sensor processing)

Musk is involved in every aspect of Golden Dome.

This was my thought the first time I heard these talked about on a podcast where it talked about there being infinite cooling ... and I just kind of face-palmed because it was like, "This is being discussed by people who don't know things about space." We already have places on earth with effectively unlimited solar power and effectively unlimited cooling (though not the same places) but without having to launch stuff into space.

> There is however, benefit in saying you'll do it to advance a narrative

Its almost as if there is good money to be made promoting bad ideas! Theranos, Wework, Tesla, NFTs, Crypto.

To say the even quieter part out loud, datacenters are colonial encampments (like energy projects). Space has no indigenous people to colonize.

In theory rocket launches sound bad, with burning fuels all the way up to the top layers of the atmosphere, but it's not clear right away that we're significantly increasing the "burnt up stuff" vs say, the ~100 tons of meteorites that hit every night.

Arguments re: Methane as a non-renewable resource are of course right, except that we technically can synthesize methane from CO2 + electricity (e.g., terraform industries), but the pollution angle is presented as-is, without a systematic analysis, right?

What's the actual atmospheric burden here?

This essentially says "We dont know"

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2025/03/04/rockets-affect-...

Starlink v2 Mini has about 35 kW of solar power at peak irradiance. 2 kW is quite far from the limit of how much juice we can pack into modern mass produced satellites.

Some of the proposals are much much bigger than this. Five GW, and 16 square kilometres.

It’s amusing that the article points out how large the radiators will have to be, when the proposals already include building giant radiators. Or that the satellites will have to be vastly larger than the ISS; surprise, surprise, that’s also part of the plan.

I mean why not just have a whole bunch of floating buoys doing computation on the ocean? They can probably get energy both from solar and from the tidal wave energy. Cooling certainly won't be an issue.

Communication might be a bit rough.

I'm as critical as OP on data centers in space, but "A City on Mars" was a really badly researched book, full of errors, that completely misrepresented the would-be Mars settler position. I wouldn't take seriously anyone quoting it unless they've also read, at minimum, "The Case for Mars" as well.

> The worst real estate on Earth is better than the best real estate on Mars or Luna.

Very true..

Here's a recent HN link to a chilling documentary about one of the most isolated settlements in the world: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46040459

  >"A City on Mars" (2024)

https://nss.org/wp-content/uploads/NSS-JOURNAL-Critique-of-A...

As someone with only a basic knowledge of space technology, my first thought when I read the idea was "how the hell are they going to cool it".

> On the SEU issue I’ll add in that even in LEO you can still get SEUs

As a sibling post noted, SEUs are possible all the way down to sea level. The recent Airbus mass intervention was essentially a fix for a badly handled SEU in a corner case.

Single event upsets are already commonplace at sea level well below data center scale.

The section of the article that talks about them isn’t great. At least for FPGAs, the state of the art is to run 2-3 copies of the logic, and detect output discrepancies before they can create side effects.

I guess you could build a GPU that way, but it’d have 1/3 the parallelism as a normal one for the same die size and power budget. The article says it’d be a 2-3 order of magnitude loss.

It’s still a terrible idea, pf course.

The only advantage I can come up with is the background temperature being much colder than Earth surface. If you ignored the capex cost to get this launched and running in orbit, could the cooling cost be smaller? Maybe that's the gimmick being used to sell the idea. "Yes it costs more upfront but then the 40% cooling bill goes away... breakeven in X years"

That’s ridiculous. Space is the least nation-state-dependent place to do computing in existence.

All proposed space computing has an incredibly short orbital lifespan (less than 5y).

Every single space launch capable rocket provider in the world is financially, regulatorily, and militarily joined at the hip to a single government. No launches are taking place without that government’s say-so.

Also, space infrastructure is incredibly vulnerable to attack by nation-states as many others in this thread have pointed out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon

This is one of the early tipping points in the background of the game "Eclipse Phase", which I always found interesting:

--- >8 ---

The power of nation states is rooted in control of land and safety, as well as resources, which is an extension of the control of land. But once mining asteroids became economically viable, the connection between land and resources disappeared. Once space habitation in space and secretly developed weapon systems from space became viable, the connection between safety, habitation and land disappeared.

This allowed corporations and new organizations to rise to power large enough to challenge nation states. Those in power did feared to lose their power, which caused the great war which gave rise to the grey mass and destroyed earth.

--- 8< ---

It's a very cool back story, which gives rise to a rogue nanite swarm (the gray mass), which forces an evacuation of earth within days. The only way this was even possible was by uploading human minds onto storage and planting them in robots later on. Naturally, most humans are then forced to work for these corporations. Other humans are still biological and they don't like robots, to say the least.

If you can control satellites from the ground, then so can the government governing that ground location. An armed 10-person strike team could force SpaceX to access or even de-orbit the entire Starlink constellation. They don’t because doing so would be illegal and dangerous, not because it is somehow technically difficult.

If a company were to go on its own and build data centers in space only to avoid nation state jurisdiction, they better be prepares to defend that hardware in space.

If a country doesn't like what is happening they can shoot it down, and with no humans onboard or nations claiming jurisdiction there really isn't much to stop them or to answer for.

Putting data centers on ships in international waters would be just as effective at evading government control (i.e. not very) while being orders of magnitude easier and cheaper to build and operate.

By the same argument Google could start literal star wars by blowing up AWS data centres. Because it is the wild west up there right? No pesky laws.

Except the people that run and manage that satellite will be on earth, under some nation state's rules...

If crypto were the reason for the orbital data centers, then an easier path would be to use crypto that doesn't require huge data centers. That's pretty much any proof-of-stake blockchain, especially the more decentralized ones.

Data centers in space is about leading investors to circumvent their brains and jump on the hype train at worst, and developing technology around data center infrastructure at best.

Microsoft did something similar with their submarine data center pilots. This gets more press because AI.

This is the only "advantage" I can see with space-based datacenters. Crypto will remain a joke but putting devices beyond the reach of ground-based jurisdictions is a libertarian dream. It will probably fail - you still need plenty of ground infrastructure.

I'm sorry, but this is stupid. It's the same dumb thinking behind Sealand: "we're outside state borders! nobody can touch us!", which was only true as long as nobody cared what they were doing. Once Sealand actually started angering people, the Royal Navy showed up and that was that. "Datacenters in space" wouldn't fare any better: multiple nations have successfully tested anti-satellite weapons.

Nation states can fire missiles at your space datacenter, bruh.

Nah; let it fail in place.

See also: Any on-prem horror show that budgeted for capex, rent, cooling, network and power, but not maintenance.

Yes. Anyone who thinks you can ship a datacenter to space and save has never managed a datacenter.

> So obviously we're not going to be some SREs into space to babysit the machines.

Shut up! This is the chance for one of us to go into space! I don't care if all I'm doing is swapping 1U pizza boxes in the cold hard vacuum of space, I'm down!

Plus, in space, their electronic components would experience much more radiation (and the effects on components). They could build with rad-hardened components but those are both more expensive and several generations older than SOTA found in the habitable zone.

It is far easier to build them at remote places and bunkers (or both). Even at the middle of the ocean will make more sense and provide better cooling (See Microsoft attempt at that).

The reason why we don't see satellite-targeting missiles is not because the problem is hard. All relevant actors are capable of that.

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if a non zero number of pitch meetings start with, "in order to not disrupt your life too much as the mobs of the starving and displaced beat down your door"

The only vaguely valid dual use technology I can see coming out of this is improving space-rated processing enough that deep space probes sent out to Uranus or whatever can run with more processing power than a Ti-82 and thus can actually do some data processing rather than clogging up the deep space network for three weeks on an uplink with less power than a lightbulb

What makes an orbital facility at less risk of getting bombed?

Solar panel performance is not the limiting factor in space. Thermal management is. Better solar panels don't help you here. Neither does permanent sunshine -- without the capability to radiate more heat at night, you've made the thermal management problem immensely worse.

Rockets: Launching no mass to orbit is even cheaper still.

Bandwidth: You do realize that even starlink speeds are crazy slow and high latency compared to data center optical connections? Fiber and copper always win out over wifi. With space, you are stuck with wifi. (Oversimplified, but accurate.)

Space solar power: there has been talk of this for half a century, yes. It never materialized because, like space data centers, it doesn't make economic sense.

1) ISS is about 30 years old. It's hardly the state of the art in solar technology.

Domestic solar panels are heavy, and dont need to deal with hypersonic sand blasting. even at that height, you are in shadow every 90 minutes.

> 3) The article complains about lack of bandwidth. Star Link serves millions of customers with high speed, low latency internet via thousands of satellites.

Right. First power and heat are a massive pain to deal with. You need megawatts to run a datacentre. A full rack of GPUs (48u, 96 GPUs) is around 40-70kw. It also weighs a literal ton.

You also need to be able to power that in the time when you are in darkness. BUT! when you are zooming around the earth every 90 minutes, you can't maintain a low latency connection, because the distance between you and the datacentre.

That means geostationary, as that solves most of your power issues, but now you have latency and bandwidth issues. (oh and power, inverse square law and bandwidth are related)

> 5) Learning effects

Great, but it gets us nothing.

> In short, counter arguments to articles like this almost write themselves.

Yes, arguments that are facts-and-numbers-free are easy to write, but that applies to any topic, not just space data centers.

Can you please tell me your credentials compared to someone who actually built material that went into space? Like the author of the article

What's your counter argument for the thermal budget problem ?

Dissipating heat into outer space is extremely difficult, you can't escape thermodynamics.

It’s not about things improving. This isn’t a great idea that’s not yet feasible, the way ubiquitous satellite communication was. This is a fundamentally bad idea based on the physics, not the technology.

Satellites are so much more expensive than just running a wire, so why is satellite communication desirable? Because one satellite can serve many remote places for less than it costs to run a wire to all of them, it can serve the middle of the ocean, it can serve moving vehicles. These are fundamental advantages that make it worthwhile to figure out how to make satellite communication viable.

Data centers in space offer no fundamental advantages. They have some minor advantages. Solar power is somewhat more available. They can reach a larger area of ground with radio or laser communication. And that’s about it. Stack those advantages against the massive disadvantages in cooling, construction, and maintenance. Absent breakthroughs in physics that allow antigravity tech or something like that, these advantages are fundamental, not merely from insufficient technology.

Sci-fi isn't even really about the tech. It's about what happens to us, humans, when the tech changes in dramatic ways. Sci-fi authors dream up types of technology that create new social orders, factions, rifts, types of interpersonal relationships, types of fascism, where the unforseen consequences of human ingenuity hoist us upon our collective petard.

But these baffoons only see the blinky shiney and completely miss the point of the stories. They have a child's view of SF the way that men in their teens and 20d thought they were supposed to be like Tyler Durden.

I think the last time they put commodity hardware in orbit was via the HPE[1] project and the results were quite mixed with failure rates for components that were quite high. In addition to running the system in a twin config to get any meaningful work done.

Best case scenario custom ASICs for specialised workloads either for edge computing of orbital workloads or military stuff.That would be with ability to replace/upgrade components rather than a sealed sat like environment.

Its similar to the hype for spacelink type sats for internet connectivity rather than a proper fiber buildout that would solve most of the issues at less cost.After the last couple of years seeing the deployment in UKR,Sahel its mostly a mil tool.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/updated_hpe_spaceborn...

> The only one that might apply is cost: if it's cheaper to build data centers on Earth, then space doesn't make sense (and it won't happen).

So the only problem left to be solved is that space datacenters would be millions of times more expensive per unit of compute than a ground based datacenter. And cost millions of times more to maintain.

Starlink solves for a problem where there is not a good alternative: high-speed Internet access for rural environments. Land-based solutions for this are potentially even more expensive than putting satellites in space.

But clearly Starlink is not competitive with widely-available residential Internet access offerings, and nowhere near what is expected of terrestrial data centers. People use Starlink when there are no other good options. In the urban areas where most people live, people use land-based ISPs because they are cheaper and better.

An example, by contrast: Trammell Crow is planning a 12 million square foot data center campus in Georgia that will be infinitely more maintainable and have access to better Internet connections than anything space bound. At $8.4B, it will be significantly less expensive than space bound alternatives.

There are better options than space for data centers, so space data centers are unlikely to be a thing. (Someone will probably do a trial for PR though.)

>Almost every single objection to data centers in space has already been overcome at a smaller scale with Starlink

Did you not read the article? It had many objections that make it clear datacenters in space are unworkable...

The facts you quoted just made me even more convinced that space-based datacenters will not be cost effective any time soon. If an entire generation of satellites costing many billions of dollars can't power more GPUs than a single terrestrial datacenter, how could it possibly be cost effective?

At what price per MW of load?

Maybe if you build the datacenter inside an asteroid, and use the whole surface as an infrared radiator.

And they've already at least tried datacenters in the ocean.

https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...

The only sentence in the whole "paper" about cooling is

> Cooling would be achieved through a thermal system of heat pipes and radiators while operating at nominal temperatures

Which is kind of similar to writing a paper about building a bridge over the Pacific and saying "The bridge would be strong enough by being built out of steel". Like you can say it, but that doesn't magically make it true.

Pedantically, Microsoft has actually submerged datacenters (UDC). Google's only tried pumping seawater for cooling.

Selection bias.

Science is very very very rarely disrupted by a small group of visionaries in the same way business or technology are.

Substitute “perpetual motion machines” for “datacenters in space”. For very Heisenberg and Einstein there are thousands of crackpots who wasted huge amounts of (often other people’s) money trying to build perpetual motion machines. None of them were remembered.

The overwhelming majority of real scientific advancement is slow, grinding, difficult, incremental, and group-based.

I always believed thermal conductivity to be one of the hardest problems in space.

Today the way we diffuse temperature is via the air itself, and without air to carry heat away from components we don’t really have very much to work with.

I know space is cold, but diffusing the cold onto the warm is an ongoing problem as far as I understood it.

Which is why for example of nuclear submarines would not bode well in space, the internal temperature would just continue to rise until eventually the thing will become an oven floating through the solar system.

The idea that science progresses by lone wolf geniuses disrupting the status quo is simply false. It makes a good story for low budget documentaries, but it is basically never true.

Radiation does not work “incredibly well”, especially at the temperature range of interest. Forced convection (what every large terrestrial electronics system uses, from gaming laptops to terrestrial data centers) is orders of magnitude more efficient at pulling heat out of electronics than radiation. Normally electronics generate heat in a very small area relative to the entire package size, and conduction+radiation offers many practical issues to efficiently dissipating that heat to deep space.

Source: many years of practical engineering experience solving this exact problem.

I think it's a great article that should discourage a lot of people to waste resources.

To really do it you have to treat this article as a to-do list of challenges to overcome. If you have no ideas on how to address those challenges you should not start.

> The most important thing being cheap is that access to the Space become possible for way more people with creativity. Not just a few people with academic titles but people with practical engineering and scientific mastery (that certainly run circles around them on real projects).

Agreed! Real estate is incredibly cheap in space until Saudi money and private equity figure out a way to make it a scarce resource. Also, we can build massive single suburban homes in space! No need to build vertical and public transit. Just give everyone a rocketship to travel to the nearest space McDs drive through!

Counterpoint: oceangate

Sometimes when people tell you something can't be done they're right. No amount of gumption will cancel out physics.

Please don't propagate the myth that Einstein couldn't wrap his head about Heisenberg.

The EPR paper says otherwise and Bohr's response to it was incomprehensible (and still is).

Einstein was simply saying science should not stop looking into the why.

Interesting point actually. yeah, when spacex was trying to build a reusable rockets, many traditional rocket scientists said that even if you are able to recover stages of the rocket, you still need to refurbish and test a great number of parts, and it just isn’t this panacea for lowering rocket costs (for example, the space shuttle, which was reusable spacecraft, but was super expensive to launch).

When spacex finally got falcon 9 reusability working (and am no expert in this) but from what I read, the pundits were partially right and partially wrong. Yes, refurbishment and testing on the Falcon 9 does cost a lot, but it still brings down the cost significantly (just looked it up, their saying nowadays, the cost savings is something like 70%, which actually is huge). And as importantly, you don’t have to build a new rocket for every launch, and once you get your refurbishment process down like clockwork, you can relaunch them quite often.

So maybe data centers in space won’t be like ones on earth, but they still might be very useful… One idea is that they could become true “space” data centers, that supply powerful computing for satellites near by. This way satellites could get access to much more powerful computing, while still being small themselves (but again, am no expert in this, so maybe this idea also has many holes, for example why not just offload processing to ground based data centers).

What are the fundamental advantages of space-based data centers over terrestrial ones? Certainly not cooling or radiation shielding. Those are almost free on Earth. A Zero-G environment could have some benefits regarding the total size of the construction, but of course being in Earth orbit means Zero-G but does not mean no gravity. Anything in LEO will require constant station-keeping maneuvers, and the more massive the data centers, the more fuel required. Power generation could theoretically be better, but even if you had a 100% efficient PV solar shield, you still need to radiate away the same amount of energy at a rate at least equal to that to maintain thermal equilibrium.

You could say this is all just a question of materials science, and maybe it is, but it’s not anything that makes any sense at all today, nor is it something I think anyone should expect to be up and running in the next century.

Any honest discussion will conclude that it ought not to be attempted so it doesn't matter for such discussions whether it's possible or not.

The Moon doesn't have a magnetic field, though, so the second half of the article discussing difficulties due to radiation would still apply, right?

It's not a viable heat sink because it's a thermal insulator that doesn't support transport of heat. The thermal conductivity of lunar regolith is lower than rock-wool insulation,

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9646997/ ("Thermophysical properties of the regolith on the lunar far side revealed by the in situ temperature probing of the Chang’E-4 mission" (2022))

https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/thermal-conductivity-d_42...

(Imagine, for entertainment purposes, what would happen if you wrapped a running server rack in a giant ball of rock-wool insulation, 50 meters in radius).

Only way to dissipate large amounts of heat on the moon is with sky-facing radiators.

You'd have most of the problems of building in space, an abrasive quasi-atmosphere of dust, half a month of darkness every month, and not as good of a heat sink as the Earth's atmosphere.

I had this same thought and mentioned it on an ArsTechnica forum. There was reply that suggested that lunar regolith wouldn't be a good heat sink and a bit of googling makes me think this is probably true.

That said anything has to be better then almost literally nothing so I'm still holding out for datacenters on the moon.

There’s laws in space. Specifically, those of the country (or country of the subject) that launched the satellite.

>You literally just need to be in space, because no typical laws apply if you are there.

That makes no sense. Unless you are going to use the data in space (what for?), you need to import it into a country, and it is at that point the crime will have been committed. You can't, for example, circumvent GDPR laws just by sending the data into space first.

This makes no sense. The company will still be on the ground in some country and it has to connect to the Earth internet on the ground in some country. Unless you are talking about actual space pirate station, but in that case it better come equipped with missile defense because it will be attacked sooo fast.

100B is roughly NVIDIA’s yearly profit

“Dear T-Mobile/Verizon/Starlink, cease your illegal operation within 24 hours or we will start imprisoning executives.”

There was money behind Theranos too so I disagree about it being very interesting.

The sun’s radiation hitting earth is 44,000 terawatts. I think we’re fine with an “extra” terawatt. (It’s not even extra, because it would be derived from the sun’s existing energy.)

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/135642main_b...

I tried Google and it pointed me to a ycombinator video about Starcloud https://youtu.be/hKw6cRKcqzY They launched a satellite with one H100 in on Nov 2nd.

>I mean, when you tell people that within 10 years it could be the case that most new data centers are being built in space, that sounds wacky to a lot of people, but not to YC. (8:00)

You can radiate the excess energy away on the non-sun facing part. In theory.

I'mma guess that AI mixed up "datacenter" with "Dyson" to get nonsensical returns involving both vacuums AND space!

You could help by using the thumbs down button below the answer.

OpenAI has over 1 million GPU.

Starlink satellites would be pointless for doing computation because they are spread across the Earth resulting in horrible latency. AI companies spend lots of money on super fast connects within a datacenter.

Starlink with GPU might have some advantage for running edge GPU. But most Starlink customers are close to ground station and it makes a lot more sense to have GPUs there. It is a lot easier to manage them than launching new satellites which could take years.

Building datacenters in the arctic also has the added benefit that sysadmins would have to take polar bear safety lessons, which would be pretty funny.

Pantheon style

But for what benefit?

Perhaps Elmo can move his toxic, illegal, cancer inducing, gas generators there, instead of doing it in Memphis. https://tennesseelookout.com/2025/07/07/a-billionaire-an-ai-...

"Mind-bogglingly poorly thought out to the degree of a cynical money-grubbing scheme worthy of the finest cambodian slave camp" was taken and is disrespectful to the hard work and education of said slave camp's operators.

Apparently the book whose title the phrase comes from [1] was published in 1972, four years after Dijkstra published "Considered Harmful".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_and_the_Terrible,_Ho...

The problem isn't "how to cool the chips", it's "how to cool the whole friggin data center."

Any active cooling solution you can think of actually makes the problem worse (unless it's "eject hot mass").

It's not that it's hard, it's that it's stupid - it's based on a misunderstanding of the physics involved which completely negates any of the benefits.

It's the opposite of engineering, where you understand a problem space and then try to determine the optimal solution given the constraints. This starts with an assumption that the solution is correct, and then tries to engineer fixes to gaps in the solution, without ever reevaluating the solution choice.

From: https://engine.xyz/resident-companies/northwood-space

> Unlike traditional parabolic dish antennas, our phased array antenna can connect with multiple satellites simultaneously.

if that's how they plan to reach more than 1Gbps, then that's not 100Gbps per satellite, that's 100 for a collection of satellites.

Starlink is about 100Mbps. That's 1000x times less than 100Gbps

Unless thermodynamics suddenly changes, how exactly is the cooling problem being solved? Yeeting hot chunks of matter out the back? On a planetary body you have an entire massive system of matter to reject your heat into. In space, you have nothing.

That's not the argument though. The argument is "it can be done, the methods to do it are known, but the claims about space being an optimal location to locate our AI datacenters are false and the tradeoffs and unit economics of doing it makes no sense compared with building a data centre on earth somewhere with power and water, preferably not too hot.

But for a more nuanced and optimistic take, this one is good and highlights all the same issues and more https://www.peraspera.us/realities-of-space-based-compute/

(TLDR: the actual use cases for datacentres in space rely on the exact opposite assumption from visions of space clouds for LLMs: most of space is far away and has data transmission latency and throughput issues so you want to do a certain amount of processing for your space data collection and infrastructure and autonomous systems on the edge)

Cooling data centers in space effectively can't be done right now … or ever.

What reason is there to build datacenters in space, though? Literally, what limitation do we face in building datacenters on Earth would building them in space improve?

There are things which are difficult and have unsolved problems, and there are things that just fundamentally make no sense.

Nobody is proposing data centers at the South Pole. This isn’t because it’s difficult. It is difficult, but that’s not the reason it’s not being looked at. Nobody’s doing it because it’s pointless. It’s a massive hassle for very little gain. It’s never going to be worth the cost no matter what problems get solved.

Data centers in space are like that. It’s not that it’s difficult. It’s that the downsides are fundamentally much worse than the advantages, because the advantages aren’t very significant. Ok, you get somewhat more consistent solar power and you can reach a wider ground area by radio or laser. And in exchange for that, you get to deal with cooling in a near perfect insulator, a significantly increased radiation environment, and difficult-to-impossible maintenance. Those challenges can be overcome, sure, but why?

This whole thing makes no sense. Maybe there’s something we just aren’t seeing, or maybe this is what happens when people are able to accumulate far too much money and nobody is willing to tell them they’re being stupid.

You can't just "leave them there" though. They orbit at high speed, which effectively means they actually take up vastly more space, with other objects orbiting at high speed intersecting those orbits. The orbits that are most useful are relatively narrow bands shared with a lot of other satellites and a fair amount of debris, and orbits tend to decay over time (which is a problem if you're in low earth orbit because they'll decay all the way into the atmosphere, and a problem if you're in geostationary orbit because you'll lose the advantage of stationary bit for maintaining comms links). This is a solvable problem with propulsion, but that entails bringing the propellant with you and end-of-life (or an expensive refuelling operation) when it runs out. The cost of maintaining real estate space is vastly more than out right owning land.

Similarly, making stuff have a great life expectancy is much more expensive than having it optimized for cost and operational requirements instead but stored somewhere you can replace individual components as and when they fail, and it's also much easier to maximise life expectancy somewhere bombarded by considerably less radiation.

There is lots and lots and lots of space on Earth where hardly anyone is living. Cheap rural areas can support extremely large datacenters, limited only by availability of utilities and workers.

Launching a datacenter like that carries an absurd cost even with Starship type launchers. Unless TSMC moves its production to LEO it's a joke of a proposal.

Underwater [0] is the obvious choice for both space and cooling. Seal the thing and chuck it next to an internet backbone cable.

> More than half the world’s population lives within 120 miles of the coast. By putting datacenters underwater near coastal cities, data would have a short distance to travel

> Among the components crated up and sent to Redmond are a handful of failed servers and related cables. The researchers think this hardware will help them understand why the servers in the underwater datacenter are eight times more reliable than those on land.

[0] https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...

Space is not much of an issue for datacenters. For one thing, compute density is growing; it's not uncommon for a datacenter to be capacity limited by power and/or cooling before space becomes an issue; especially for older datacenters.

There are plenty of data centers in urban centers; most major internet exchanges have their core in a skyscraper in a significant downtown, and there will almost always be several floors of colospace surrounding that, and typically in neighboring buildings as well. But when that is too expensive, it's almost always the case that there are satellite DCs in the surrounding suburbs. Running fiber out to the warehouse district isn't too expensive, especially compared to putting things in orbit; and terrestrial power delivery has got to be a lot less expensive and more reliable too.

According to a quick search, StarLink has one 100g space laser on equipped satellites; that's peanuts for terrestrial equipment.

We have tons of space on earth. Cooling in space would be so expensive.

What use is having lots of space, when to actually build out that space you need mass, which is absurdly expensive to launch?

Why does what it powers matter? As long as it can power something.

The obsolete stuff can be deorbited or recycled in space.

Starship is on a fast track to failure. It is not a cheaper way to get to orbit and will never get there at the current pace. And even if it were, it would not make getting to orbit so cheap that it would somehow make it economically viable to put a datacenter there.

You still have to build the GPUs, etc for the datacenter whether it’s on Earth or in orbit. But to put it in space you also need massive new cooling solution, radiation shielding, orbital boosting, data transmission bandwidth, and you have to launch all of that.

And then, there are zero benefits to putting a datacenter in space over building it on Earth. So why would you want to add all that extra expense?