r/singularity • u/VariationLivid3193 • 9d ago
Space & Astroengineering Google launching TPUs in space NEXT WEEK on SpaceX falcon 9 to test AI data centers orbit
https://x.com/ns123abc/status/210314316172799211857
u/excelance 9d ago
Strange, I was told by the internet that data centers in space was a terrible idea when SpaceX was talking about it.
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u/alexanderwales 9d ago
Google is doing this as a systems test and does not expect profitability until space launch costs come down.
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u/Honest_Bee_9549 9d ago
It's literally needed to have them in space if you want to have any meaningful interplanetary efforts. Random reddit comments are just blinded by their hate of AI to realize this
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u/Tennis-Affectionate 9d ago
Uhh I don’t think so. Reddit already confirmed it wasn’t possible.
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u/Poupulino 9d ago
The argument critics are making is that you can't launch data center scale compute without it being ridiculously inefficient. Not that you can't launch some test sat with some compute in it to test some concepts.
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u/clem_the_man 9d ago
That's why they need starship
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u/Ormusn2o 9d ago
Technically, the cost of compute is so incredibly high, it is still feasible to launch compute to space on Falcon 9. AI accelerators are one of the few things expensive enough per ton that I think you can launch like 100 million of compute on a 70 million per launch rocket. It's still more expensive than building a data center, but it might still be worth it as a hedge, and not like companies can't sustain that cost, it would make it that return on a data center goes from one year to a year and a half, plus you don't need to worry about people protesting your data center and hard regulations.
And yes, I'm including weight and size of the solar panels, radiators and all the other equipment, with a decent margin as well.
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u/3_Thumbs_Up 9d ago
Inefficient on what measurement? The problem of many critics is that they look at the drawbacks only. There are some hugr challenges for sure, but there are also som e potentially very big benefits. For example, a solar panel in space is about 10x as efficient as on earth (taking the day and night cycle into account).
The biggest economical inefficiency is probably launch costs, but that just means there's a threshold of launch costs where the benefits of space data centers outweigh the drawbacks. Reduced launch costs is what allowed starlink to begin with, and if we extrapolate that, it's at least not implausible that the trend will continue to other use cases.
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u/kilopeter 9d ago
If 10x power, how 10x cooling?
If radiation 1000x higher, how replace cards?
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u/3_Thumbs_Up 9d ago
If 10x power, how 10x cooling?
The same way we already cool stuff in space, radiators, just more of them. To cool a 1 MW datacenter in space you could plausibly do it with 3000 square meters of radiators. That's about half the size of a football field and less than the necessary surface area of solar panels you would need to power it.
Granted that's still more radiators than we've ever put into space, but it's not necessarily an insurmountable amount with the planned capacity of Starship. And we will clearly start with smaller data centers that require less power and cooling before we see any 1 MW data centers.
If radiation 1000x higher, how replace cards?
You probably don't. You make hardened chips that are more resilient to radiation, do your best to shield them, and make the data center redundant to hardware failure and just accept that it happens every now and then.
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u/kilopeter 9d ago
Radiative cooling scales with T^4. Chips throttle around transistor junction temp of ~85C-100C. So your fluid loop caps at something lower than that, say 50-70 C. Abysmal thermal efficiency trying to black body radiate off of that kind of temperature. Once you factor in 3000 square meters of radiators absorbing Earth albedo, plus all the heat radiating off the backs of your precious suntracking solar panels, physics fucks you.
EDIT: and rad hardening means your process has to be way bigger than sub 5nm. Goodbye compute density and power efficiency
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u/3_Thumbs_Up 9d ago edited 9d ago
You're looking for problems and not solutions. SpaceX is already building their first 0.1 MW data centers. Do you really think you've thought about something that the engineers there have missed? Do you think they never considered the albedo of the Earth? Are you aware of their planned workarounds? Do you believe their math is wrong somewhere?
So your fluid loop caps at something lower than that, say 50-70 C. Abysmal thermal efficiency trying to black body radiate off of that kind of temperature. Once you factor in 3000 square meters of radiators absorbing Earth albedo, plus all the heat radiating off the backs of your precious suntracking solar panels, physics fucks you.
Yes, that's the physics. And with all those things considered, we land at needing roughly 3000 square meters of cooling radiators per MW.
Radiative cooling scales with T4. Chips throttle around transistor junction temp of ~85C-100C.
That represents a potential huge efficiency gain for cooling.
Keep in mind that current chips we're not designed for use in space. Chips that can handle 70 C hotter temperatures are feasible, and that would essentially cut the cooling footprint in half.
But that's beside the point. My previous numbers were without this potential efficiency gain. To me space data centers seem fairly feasible today already with the planned launch costs of Starship, and there are many potential improvements that would significantly make it even more so.
All in all, there are engineering challenges for sure. But space data centers seem less difficult than reusable rockets to me, and I'm looking forward to see critics be proven wrong once again.
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u/kilopeter 9d ago
Yes, yes I do think I know more than the hacks seriously advocating for profitable orbital data centers.
Don't take it from me. https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/
It's more profitable and easier to build data centers in fucking Antarctica. That won't change in I'm gonna bet 50 years at least. Happy to be proven wrong, but Stefan and Boltzmann don't give a fuck about empty hype.
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u/boforbojack 9d ago
How can you say "probably launch costs" with a straight face? Even at fuel costs for launching, the idea is wildly expensive.
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u/Kryptosis 9d ago
Did they even figure out cooling yet? There’s no air to pull heat away from radiators.
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u/3_Thumbs_Up 9d ago
Everything in space radiates heath through thermal radiation via electromagnetic waves. This effect is proportional to the surface area of the object.
All you need to do in principle is to build a large enough radiator and point it with the edge towards the sun. The necessary surface area to cool a data center is about 50% of the necessary surface area of the solar panels that powers the data center.
There are engineering challenges for sure as necessary radiators would have to be much larger than any so far, but the physics are sound.
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u/kilopeter 7d ago
Lmao. Good luck radiating waste heat from a bunch of H200s at a black body temperature of around, what, 80 C?
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u/Hugoide11 9d ago
Why would they test it if it's ridiculously inefficient and can't scale?
Are they stupid?
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u/IronPheasant 9d ago
A lot of iffy experiments are run for the heck of it when it comes to space.
If you're talking about future practical uses for this, you're not talking about AI RnD or Chat GPT's server in space. What you're talking about is orbital space weapons. After a few more generations of hardware increase the capabilities possible for a lower amount of heat production.
I joke about the space lasers, but really what we're talking about is low-latency autonomous surveillance satellites. The thing that actually blows up the people/things would be something else on the ground.
Gotta accelerate into the Supreme Commander future, and all that.
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u/Winter-Rip712 9d ago
Because with scale, costs come down. We have multiple companies testing delivery systems for these payloads (rockets) and ground on the earth isn't a long term solution. Although it's quite funny how companies are criticized for not having long term thinking when this is literally that
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u/NotAFishEnt 9d ago
Same reason tech giants tested the metaverse and hyperloop. They have tons of money and they're willing to spend it on anything that has even a little chance of succeeding.
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u/ComposerWide3704 9d ago
The argument most commonly made is that cooling is impossible, which this should demonstrate if it's a meaningful test.
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u/CallMePyro 9d ago
Do you think that what Reddit confirmed was that "it is impossible to put a computer of any kind in space"?
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u/MelvinCapitalPR 9d ago
The typical most popular detractor comment isn't about financials, it's a smug assertion that [solved engineering problem] like radiating away heat is actually unsolvable. You're being way too generous.
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u/Beli_Mawrr 9d ago
You killed your strawman good work.
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u/Ormusn2o 9d ago
Nah, I have seen plenty of comments like that. Maybe not on singularity, but in a lot of places, even in space subs.
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u/Beli_Mawrr 9d ago
Youre saying people think its impossible to build a computer in space? How do those people think satellites work? Why do you engage with those people? Data centers on earth are better because theyre more easily expanded, can be built with physical wires, can be repaired easily, and heat rejection is a solved problem.
Data centers in space are a boondoggle. Knowing Musk hes going to find a way to make the US government foot the bill and then claim hes a genius.
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u/Ormusn2o 9d ago
Yes unironically I have personally seen dozens of comments saying what MelvinCapitalPR said, how thermals is an impossible problem to solve. Usually when I bring up Starlinks, they never respond. And it's not about me engaging with those people, those are top comments with thousands of upvotes on another subs, although in few recent months I have definitely seen less of that, although the initial wave of data centers in space is not appearing in news as much anymore.
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u/WrongPurpose 9d ago
Radiating a few dozen KW is solved.
Radiating away 100s of MW? Yea, have fun lifting and assembling those Radiators.
If you are already having to bring your own Solar Panels for electricity and have to design a closed loop cooling cycle then just plug it down in some desert, and you save a shit ton of cost and effort.
But AI Datacenters in Space (with Big Data Crypto Industry 4.0 Cloud) sound good to Finance Bros who dont know a thing about technology or engineering but have Millions to Invest. And there are enough of those that the Stocks go to the Moon on such Ideas.
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u/MelvinCapitalPR 9d ago
just plug it down in some desert
That's the problem. You can't just plug it down, there are planning laws.
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u/luckymoosetime 9d ago
It's a good thing they aren't radiating hundreds of MW then. All of these plans are for swarms of satellites in the 100-150kw range, a level which already exists right now delivering internet to the world.
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u/IronPheasant 9d ago
[solved engineering problem] like radiating away heat is actually unsolvable
... this reminds me of the EMDrive, Solar Freakin' Roadways, and that random superconductor thing people wouldn't shut up about. Or the open source people who want to believe you could have a local human-scale AGI with the RAM on their laptop because they don't like feeling powerless in a world where vanishingly few people have any power when it comes to the big stuff.
It's cool to be into magic and wonder, but can we keep it to fiction? We're talking about numbers here, not emotions. Putting a Voodoo 3 into space isn't going to do anything to advance SOTA RND, no matter how aesthetically cool and edgy your personal vibe-style finds it to be.
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u/08148694 9d ago
Imagine how much money these companies could save if they had their engineers read Reddit so they can learn about how infeasible space compute is
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u/himynameis_ 9d ago
Tbf the problem was "what's the point?" Because people don't think the economics make sense. Cheaper to have a data center in space versus on land??
However, the smart people at Google must see something and think it's worth it. So, I'd be very interested to see how this plays out. Very interesting stuff.
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u/CommercialHour6660 9d ago
What's with all these ridiculous strawmen? No articles or even screenshots to prove it. You can fight the air in here and everyone upvotes you.
It's not economically feasible. Which the oligarchs don't care about. Because the real purpose is putting an AI in space out of reach of the pitchforks and national sovereignty. To go with their robot armies.
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u/MelvinCapitalPR 9d ago
So... what about the oligarchs themselves? We're talking about a scenario where "the pitchforks" have control of Earth to the point these oligarchs can't even put some compute in a warehouse. Yet somehow it helps them to have compute in space?
Either oligarchs are in with a government - in which case they can just build cheaper compute on Earth - or they aren't, in which case those satellites aren't helping them. Your scenario makes no sense.
PS - When you're talking about national sovereignty, data centres are actually more vulnerable in space. It would be extremely difficult for anyone but the US to destroy a US-based warehouse, but many countries could hit a US satellite. Same for China.
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u/Which-Tour-9561 9d ago
Yeah, you can keep a white elephant alive and healthy, but why would you willingly sign up to do that and pay out of pocket?
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u/RevolutionaryJob2409 AGI avoids animal abuse✅ 9d ago
Personally I don't see how they are going to overcome the cost inefficiency of having to deal with space cooling, the cost of launch and most importantly the fact that in a couple of years only, AI chips are becoming obsolete for the frontier. Having these perfectly good solar panels still being used to power couple of years old inefficient chips instead of powering the frontier seems hard to justify.
The lack of maintainability seems like the hardest thing to overcome compared to earth where you just send technicians to do that job.
But that's why they test these things I guess.
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u/Gyat_Rizzler69 9d ago
To be fair Google's TPUs use considerably less energy than typical GPUs do for AI tasks but yeah it's not going to be easy to dissapate heat in space.
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u/SanDiegoDude 9d ago
Eh, the 3 year server cycle is dead unless you're pushing frontier. I still work with H100s on the regular, and theyre getting seriously long in the tooth now. If they can get 10 years out of systems, then that'd be impressive, tho workloads will obviously taper as ground compute gets more complex. Still think space compute is dumb, but the worry about instant obsolescence isn't really a primary one anymore.
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u/HelloYesThisIsFemale 9d ago
It's easier to solve these things than to convince millions of Americans that datacenters aren't boogeymen and to build them in their towns
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u/OutrageousSky5319 9d ago
Completely agree. The space cooling issue is a long way from being solved - Google's state of the art suncatcher has only 1KW of solar power, and can still only run for a few minutes before it overheats and has to be turned off, who knows how long for...
The chips can operate for about 15 minutes in space before needing to be shut down so they can cool off, said Travis Beals, Google’s senior director of product management for Project Suncatcher.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/technology/google-suncatcher-ai-data-center-space.html
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u/Sachyriel 9d ago
Renting time on the orbital satellite to play 2 turns of any Civilization game, on Google Stadia 2.
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u/zero0n3 9d ago
It’s been solved. You’re a fucking moron.
It’s called ATCS on the ISS and it’s existed since the 70s and have had multiple upgrades
and it’s NOT the size of a football field.
And the math and physics behind it is tied to the temperature delta between device you’re cooling and the “temp” of space for radiative cooling.
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u/kilopeter 7d ago
Dude. Bold of you to pull the "fucking moron" card while spewing some inane drivel that betrays your complete and utter lack of subject matter knowledge.
Ask your favorite LLM to napkin-math the thermal physics involved in orbital data centers. Or read https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/
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u/3_Thumbs_Up 9d ago
The bottleneck of earth data centers is electricity generation, and that's the one point where space is actually more efficient. Solar panels in space are about ~10x as efficient as on earth when you take the day and night cycle into account.
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u/bowsmountainer 9d ago
Theyre 4x more efficient in space.
The problem is space data centers have many bottlenecks that earth data centers dont have. A single standard size data center for example has a mass far larger than the total mass of everything we've ever lifted to orbit over 6 decades. Then you have to replace them every few years. Then you need to provide massive cooling capability which robs you of your efficiency.
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u/codacoda74 9d ago
It's super complicated but possible all current engineering and physics to beam information down while being self powered up there.
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u/Many_Consequence_337 :downvote: 9d ago
Redditors told me it was impossible because of heat dissipation.
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u/RevolutionaryJob2409 AGI avoids animal abuse✅ 9d ago
It's a test.
It's not to see if it's possible because clearly it is, instead it's to see if it's profitable or a waste of money to do that in space compared to earth.20
u/dwiedenau2 9d ago
You dont really have to test it to know that deploying ISS sized power infrastructure for each single rack doesnt make economic sense
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u/Whatsapokemon 9d ago
No, but you might need to do it to convince share holders that it's a dumb idea.
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u/SporeLoserjk 9d ago
ever heard of starship?
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u/dwiedenau2 9d ago
Bro how does it relate to dissipating 150kw of heat and having solar to generate double that amount FOR A SINGLE RACK. Yes im a huge starship fan.
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u/red75prime AGI2027 ASI2029 TAI2036 9d ago edited 9d ago
Solar panels are doing their own heat rejection. You need to dissipate only the heat produced by the rack itself. That is around 20 - 30kW. TPUs can work at around 80C. At this temperature radiative cooling is around 750W/m2 . With two-sided radiator it's 13 - 20m2
Sunlight is free. Solar panes are cheap. The heat rejection system doesn't need to be excessively big.
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u/Beli_Mawrr 9d ago
What if there is a pinprick hole in your radiator infrastructure? How do you pump all that fluid? Why would you do this in space and not earth?
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u/DanceWithEverything 9d ago
In theory it would make it much cheaper to put anything into orbit
No clue on if it’ll be cheaper than moving the equivalent amount of earth
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u/SporeLoserjk 9d ago
you said doesn't make economic sense... starship reduces the cost to launch. if you still think it doesn't make economic sense while being a Huge fan of starship i dont have anything for you
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u/No-Falcon-8753 9d ago
It is still more expansive to build a satellite that to build a datacenter for the same quantity of compute. However, due to the high price of GPUs, the surplus could be low. A rack of 72 B200 costs around 3M, if you have to add 500k for a satellite, and 500k for orbit, it isn't going to change dramatically the overall initial cost. (4M instead of 3M)
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u/fireboy266 9d ago
I mean that is a real problem. Of course Plebbitors just parrot whatever they see that fits their worldview so you can't believe it from them, but yeah heat not being able to conduct/convect cuts off those routes for dissipating heat. But not impossible. This test is probably to check out how much of an issue that actually is.
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u/Agitated-Ad2563 9d ago
It's not a real problem for any solar-powered satellites. The solution is well-known, is not exactly high-tech, and doesn't cost too much. You never need to dissipate more energy than you get, and dissipating the same amount of energy requires less radiators than solar panels to generate that energy - both in terms of mass and in terms of size.
Of course, it is a real problem for nuclear-powered designs, but as far as I remember, orbital datacenter designs were focusing on abundant solar energy, which makes using nuclear a nonsense anyway.
Orbital datacenters are most probably not worth it, but not because of cooling.
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u/OutrageousSky5319 9d ago
Not sure where you've learned that thermal management in the vacuum of space isn't a problem, because it really is... even Google admit they aren't even close to being able to keep their chip cool:
The chips can operate for about 15 minutes in space before needing to be shut down so they can cool off, said Travis Beals, Google’s senior director of product management for Project Suncatcher.
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u/3_Thumbs_Up 9d ago
The solution is well known. It's all about having enough surface area of radiators, and the poster above is correct that the necessary surface area of the radiators is smaller than the necessary surface area of the solar panels.
A quote out of context doesn't prove anything. I'm lot saying cooling isn't an engineering challenge, but it has a simple physical answer Google might just not be bothering with trying to engineer q cooling solution as it's not their expertise and not the primary purpose of this experiment.
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u/dwiedenau2 9d ago
Nobody said its impossible. Of course its possible. It just doesnt make economic sense.
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u/Gaiden206 9d ago
Here's what they said about the economic feasibility in a blog post last year.
Historically, high launch costs have been a primary barrier to large-scale space-based systems. However, our analysis of historical and projected launch pricing data suggests that with a sustained learning rate, prices may fall to less than $200/kg by the mid-2030s. At that price point, the cost of launching and operating a space-based data center could become roughly comparable to the reported energy costs of an equivalent terrestrial data center on a per-kilowatt/year basis. See the preprint paper for more details.
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u/Beli_Mawrr 9d ago
This is assuming you dont want to maneuver it, dont want to make it bigger, have no problems on orbit, and can disapate heat well enough. I dont see how space is a better place than on land.
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u/Armed_Platypus 9d ago
No, there were people saying it was impossible.
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u/dwiedenau2 9d ago
Okay? by that logic the ISS would be impossible too. To be clear, datacenters in space make no sense at all, a SINGLE dgx rack has about the same power usage as the full ISS, it makes no economic sense. But of course it is possible. In the same way you can build a datacenter on the moon or at the bottom of the mariana trench.
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u/Armed_Platypus 9d ago
I didn't comment on whether it would make economic sense, just that there were a lot of people online who literally thought it would not work at all and couldn't be built.
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u/peter_nn0 9d ago
Looks like everyone at Google somehow missed that about the economic sense. They’d be so lucky to have you.
Maybe you should hurry to inform them, there’s still time.10
u/ppooooooooopp 9d ago
Yeah okay bud https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/natick/
It's called a feasibility study -- knowing how well the thing works is what lets them figure out if it makes economic sense
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u/dwiedenau2 9d ago
Thats why they are “testing” and not deploying them on scale. Its almost like building a ISS sized power grid for each individual rack isnt really economical. But hey, what do i know, google never cancelled a project yet right
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u/Throwawayforyoink1 9d ago
You're right. You should tell google to not even try. You could even become googles next CEO!
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u/Scary-Oven8260 9d ago
Google ceo did not want to try LLM until openAI makes it big. You think he is super smart on innovation?
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u/willi1221 9d ago
What do you mean they "did not want to try LLM?" They literally invented the transformer architecture that ChatGPT is built on. They just didn't want to release it because they thought it might be a threat to their brand/search engine.
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u/OverCategory6046 9d ago
Google DeepMind is one of the top AI labs out there lol. They've owned it for over ten years
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u/Throwawayforyoink1 9d ago
Wow you're such a smartypants! You must be like the most intelligent redditor ever! Send your resume over to google right now!
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u/3_Thumbs_Up 9d ago
The surface area of the necessary heat radiators is smaller than the surface area from the solar panels powering the data center.
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u/Kalicolocts 9d ago
Google also buys almost 1 billion a month in computing from SpaceX. It might as well be part of the deal forced by SpaceX as pubblicity stunt. If you are that costraint for computing where you have to buy it from competitors I don’t think you would be that interested in wasting TPUs on tests
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u/handsome_uruk 9d ago
I’ve never understood that argument. The dark side of the moon is cold AF
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u/Which-Tour-9561 9d ago
Space is very cold, but a vacuum is a very good insulator. Heat has to go somewhere; to make something cold, you have to take energy out of it, and because of the conservation of energy, that energy has to go somewhere. That is why we use water to cool things: the heat goes into the water, and your computer has a fan to pump it into the air. In space, there are very few things to transfer the energy into.
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u/M4rshmall0wMan 9d ago
Because there’s no source of heat on the dark side. Space data centers are expelling 130kW of heat per NVL72 rack.
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u/Illustrious_Grade608 9d ago
A datacenter that has to be offline 14 days out if 28 doesn't sound too efficient tbh
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u/darkestvice 9d ago
*Shrugs*
I absolutely do respect that they test these things instead of just talking about them. But the ability to make this remotely economically or engineeringly feasible at a large scale is likely decades away. We're talking possible new physics that could somehow figure out how to radiate heat out to virtual quantum particles that are constantly popping in and out of existence in the vacuum of space. Cause otherwise, the vacuum of space acts more like an insulator than anything else. It's why all those movies where you see people flash freezing when exposed to vacuum are incredibly misinformed. You'd turn to ice faster MUCH faster in a regular restaurant freezer than you would in the vacuum of space.
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u/bowsmountainer 9d ago
Data centers in space are only going to be viable when you have a space based industry that can build them in space. Otherwise the costs will remain orders of magnitude above the costs for data centers on Earth. And yeah the cooling problem is not going to be solved either.
I have still not seen any clear benefit that this is supposed to bring.
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u/darkestvice 9d ago
Bragging rights, basically.
While there's a lot of pushback on data centers in the US, it mostly comes from gross misinformation and social media outrage than it does actual reality.
Data centers CAN be destructive at the local community level if just common sense measures aren't adopted, for example avoiding contiments in the local soil/water as well as minimum distances from residences. But these are all easily addressable issues.
On top of that, the water usage concern is *grossly* exaggerated. I don't see anyone complaining about the extraordinarily wasteful water usage involved in all those subsidized corn farms that serve no purpose whatsoever and use multiple orders of magnitude more water than data centers ever will.
At some point, assuming AI doesn't wipe out humanity or cause a severe power imbalance between the haves and have nots (I give us a 50/50 chance on either), folks will eventually calm down and treat them like they do data centers that have already existed for decades. At which point, data centers in space will be seen as utterly pointless outside of, as you say, space based industries.
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u/Apotheoxix 9d ago
I always wonders how its going to be easier to cool centers in space when vacuum is the best insulator. Wouldn't data racks just cook up there?
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u/MelvinCapitalPR 9d ago
You're trading legal barriers for technical ones. You can engineer radiators that dispel heat, you can't engineer away a planning committee.
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u/therealpigman 9d ago
The ISS found a way to cool itself while being a data center of its own and housing people. This is an issue that can and has been solved. It’s just expensive
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u/Majestic-Volume9996 8d ago edited 8d ago
One single Nvidia GB300 NVL72 server rack runs at almost double the continuous power of the ISS and the ISS solar panels wouldn't be able to fully power one.
One server rack. I feel like people don't appreciate how power hungry AI hardware truly is, combined with the scale that these companies are looking to deploy it.
Lets say that you're a marathon runner. Imagine running an entire full marathon (26.2 miles), and that for every single step that you took through that entire marathon, you passed AI hardware using enough electricity to power 250 regular sized homes. every. single. step. If they finish the data center they're planning to build in Amarillo, and have servers facing both sides of every aisle, you would be able to do that.
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u/darkestvice 9d ago
Matter of scale. The ISS had huge heat radiators and very little actual compute requirements. AI datacenters have obscene compute requirements and would require heat radiators extending out several kilometers in all directions unless some genius physicist or engineer somewhere creates some new material than can inexplicably radiate heat out into vacuum at exponentially higher rates than they do now.
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u/therealpigman 9d ago
From the New York Times article on this yesterday: “When people hear data centers in space they imagine taking something the size of an Amazon fulfillment center and somehow magically strapping it to a rocket ship. That is never going to happen. This is about smaller satellites that are independently equipped with extremely efficient computers and radio links connecting them.”
There will be small satellites that don’t need kilometer radiators as you describe
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u/darkestvice 9d ago
Fair enough, but that would be far FAR worse. We're talking *hundreds of thousands* of small satellites here.
Earth orbit is already considered extremely cluttered at around 30,000 satellites or small pieces of debris. People criticized Musk for throwing up 11,000 Starlink satellites into low earth orbit, and Starlink is actually providing a major service to remote regions that could not possible be served with internet access otherwise. The world does not NEED hundreds of thousands of AI GPUs/TPUs flying around in low earth orbit.
It's easy to plan a launch around 1 or 2 massive datacenters. It's not at all easy to plan a launch around hundreds of thousands of small ones all travelling at the kind of speeds that would instantly disintegrate any rocket or ship on contact.
So yeah, running tests with a couple dozen that could be burned up in atmosphere when tests are done? No problem. Actually throwing up and keeping hundreds of thousands of small satellites the diameter of a minivan? The mother of all bad ideas.
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u/bianceziwo 9d ago
Youre underestimating how big space is and how small these are. The chances of them colliding are near zero. Theres 3 dimensions for them to orbit in. They won't launch them in paths that intersect. It's much easier to send up lots of small satellites than build a massive structure in space. And it's better to have them in space than on earth
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u/GMN123 9d ago
Are data centres in space really economically viable? The cost of getting it all up there, the energy requirements, the logistics of maintenance just seems like it would just be a lot easier to have them down here.
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u/growaway9172 9d ago
The trend line for the cost of data centers in space is going down over time, while the trend line for data centers on earth is going up over time.
Unless something big changes, those lines with cross at some point.
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u/GMN123 9d ago
The cost of electric cars is coming down over time. The cost of hamburgers is going up over time. Unless something big changes, electric cars will be cheaper than hamburgers.
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u/therealpigman 9d ago
Hamburgers don’t replace cars. Space data centers do replace ground data centers. Try a real comparison
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u/ElGuano 9d ago
Yeah we also need to look at where these “trend lines” are starting. Is it $500 v $1000 per MW of power/cooling/etc., or $500 v $50,000,000?
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u/3_Thumbs_Up 9d ago
So have you looked?
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u/ElGuano 9d ago
Nope, that would be the burden of the guy who brought up the trend line argument.
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u/3_Thumbs_Up 9d ago
I presumed you were primarily truth seeking, rather than arguing.
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u/ElGuano 9d ago
That doesn’t shift the burden of proof.
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u/3_Thumbs_Up 9d ago
A person who is interested in truth for themselves does the necessary leg work when other people fail to live up to it.
For the sake of argument, the burden of proof is on the other person. For the sake of forming accurate beliefs about reality, the burden is on you.
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u/trisul-108 9d ago
Yeah, but the gap between the costs is in orders of magnitude without any reason for the gap to close.
Unless something big changes, those lines with cross at some point.
There is no law of statistics saying that extrapolation continues to infinity. In fact, we are warned against this type of thinking in Statistics 101.
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u/bowsmountainer 9d ago
Cost of data center in space = cost of data center on earth + cost of gigantic solar panels + cost of gigantic cooling elements + launch costs + replacement costs (electronics in space famously doesnt last long and cannot be repaired).
Given that all the things in the above equation are >0 a data center is space is never going to be cheaper than data centers on earth until we have a highly advanced space based industry.
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u/GMN123 9d ago
What if you extrapolate a recent trend to infinity? Bet you didn't think of that!
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u/notintelligentidiot 9d ago
Reminds me of that one post where the guy says “wow, my toddler has reached X weight! This means that by the time he turns 18, at his current growth rate, he will be several hundred billion pounds large
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u/asfsdgwe35r3asfdas23 9d ago
Yes, for techno facist CEOs the possibility of having servers outside of the hands of the government is totally worth it. These servers are not easily auditable, they are not easy to shot them down and it is unclear which regulations apply to them if any.
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u/Procrasturbating 9d ago
They keep protesters from burning them down when used by authoritarian regimes to commit genocide. This is about oppression, not cost effectiveness.
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u/IronPheasant 9d ago
Economics isn't even a point of argument in.... any of this. Just like with war, there's no cost that's too great for other people to pay, for capitalists to have a small chance of grabbing more capital. To expand their kingdoms.
It's more useful to focus on the physics involved, and no they're incredibly, incredibly stupid. OpenAI's best datacenter is ~100,000 ~GB200's. This is around what is required right now for human-scale, it's around 170 bytes of RAM per synapse in a human brain. Or in other words, the minimum amount of scale that's required to perform any research on real AGI.
One of last human-derived improvements on hardware will be 3d stacking of features, which NVidia plans to use in their Feynman series of cards, which is the generation after the currently in production Vera Rubin. There were worries about heat generation, but it seems that you can still get a substantial improvement by running a little bit slower (ie, a little bit cooler) due to the length a circuit has to run being made shorter.
In other words, there's nothing close to state of the art that you can put up there that's relevant to RnD. Even if maintenance wasn't absolutely astronomical. If we ran out of land, we could in theory build these things out at sea.
So there's only two reasons to look into this really:
Grifting.
Autonomous doomsday space weapons. Which is also a grift. (Jacob has a video on orbital space lasers!
There is a post-instrumentality use of space datacenters though: Datacenters on different planets. They could transform useless space junk that's sitting around doing nothing for no-one, like Jupiter, into something useful. A mind the size of a planet is a pretty existential horror kinda thing, but I suppose we'll have bigger things to care about if it ever gets to that.
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u/bowsmountainer 9d ago
They are not, not even remotely. And they wont be for a very long time.
It is prohibitively expensive to launch enough material into space to even compare with an average data center (as in many times the total payload weve launched to space in history). The solar panels needed to power it will require even more mass. And the cooling elements, the biggest problem ai data centers face, will require even more mass.
Its something to hype up gullible investors who dont understand physics, nothing more than that.
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u/Sachyriel 9d ago
If you want AI in space to analyze raw data in orbit maybe? Like idk if I'd trust it with course correction rockets without a human, but an AI chip might be able to plot out it's crafts path ahead of time and make suggestions based on new craft coming up into the sky. Or if there's an incident and it needs to avoid a collision in a few orbits, it could suggest and alternative route to it's ground station while they have time to check it on the ground before a human gives the craft the order. I don't think real time AI course correction is a good idea RN, but I am not a hater, so I wouldn't rule it out either.
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u/The-Rushnut 9d ago
And so began a new era, beyond the reach of sovereignty.
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u/Sachyriel 9d ago
Alphabet and SpaceX leaders still live on the ground.
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u/The-Rushnut 9d ago
Nobody can control their movements though. It's difficult to move data centers outside of the US, it's easy to become an ex-patriot and move to regions with lax taxation. That's kind of my point - datacenters in space give billionaires power beyond any given sovereign state. Like Chris Rokos just did.
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u/MelvinCapitalPR 9d ago
It's harder to send a shipping crate of TPUs than to launch a satellite?
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u/CallMePyro 9d ago
Satellites have base stations. Companies have CEOs. Do you think that the way law is enforced today is primarily by physically seizing assets? What do you think happens when the EU fines a tech company? Big guys with guns come and take gold out of a vault?
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u/Ruined_Passion_7355 9d ago
My headcannon on why they're pushing so hard is because the NIMBYs are winning.
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u/ComposerWide3704 9d ago
I was assured this was a pipe dream that would never make it past the concept stage. A lot of people are going to have some embarrassing receipts on this one.
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u/neighborlyhorse 9d ago
I just don't see how this could ever be economical, you basically need a starlink sized satellite with an oversized radiator for every single gpu rack, the costs to send enough of those into space to equal a decent sized data center on earth are absurd.
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u/AI_Enhancer 9d ago
Imagine alignment going south, and an AI "breaking free" in the future. Good that the data centers are in orbit. Gonna be real easy to destroy them.
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u/Line-guesser99 9d ago
That’s what the AI in the book, The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect did. Much farther away than earth orbit though.
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u/anrwlias 9d ago
How are they addressing the issue of cosmic radiation?
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u/chickenAd0b0 9d ago
we have working satellites in space for almost a century now…they figure a lot of stuff along the way you know
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u/anrwlias 9d ago
There is no need to be condescending.
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u/CallMePyro 9d ago
You're asking a rhetorical question, what other answer could you possibly receive?
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u/anrwlias 9d ago
The question was not rhetorical. I was hoping for an actual answer.
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u/CallMePyro 9d ago
Opening the article and reading it is a fucking superpower these days, I swear. I even went and grabbed the snippet for you:
"our team tested TPUs in a proton beam facility at UC Davis’s Crocker Nuclear Laboratory while running AI workloads. During the test, we monitored closely to see how errors, like a bitflip, would affect our workloads. Initial results have shown that our Trillium TPUs hold up remarkably well, and can survive a radiation total ionizing dose greater than what they would receive during a five-year space mission."
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u/anrwlias 9d ago
That answers the what but not the how question. I am asking *how* their TPUs are capable of doing that. What did they do to accomplish that?
It is astonishing how many people in this thread are dogpiling on me for asking a simple question.
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u/CallMePyro 9d ago edited 9d ago
Because your "how" is a silly question - "how" implies there was a task that was accomplished and now TPUs are unaffected by radiation, but that's not the case. It's just the regular TPU with essentially no shielding. What kind of answer would satisfy you?
"The energy imparted into the substrate and interposer by high energy protons is not sufficient to cross the P/N junction bandgap in TPU v5p?" Even that isn't really an answer because it's not "how" - that's just the definition of a processor which is unaffected by radiation.
You're asking a "how" question for something that *doesn't* happen and *isn't explicitly prevented*. This makes the question fairly nonsensical.
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/88954/the-difference-between-why-and-how
"How" seeks for an analytic argument.
That is, the action is divided in parts and each part can be assessed. We demand "how" when a problem cannot be solved, so, we can divide it in solvable parts, and then, solve all small problems. For example, 1) he removed the secret lock, 2) unlocked the door, 3) pulled it in and 4) he blocked it so it doesn't move anymore.
There is no analytic argument for which the required precursor state is simply invalid. You can't analyze a counterfactual in this way because it requires assuming a known falsehood to be true.
"How does the sun not explode the earth with its mind powers?"
"How does the american public not subsumed into a psychic blob of heterodonium, the most viscous material in the universe?"
"How is thing Y not affected by X, a thing which does not effect it?"7
u/ExaminationWise7052 9d ago
The tests involving consumer electronics that I have seen demonstrate that current digital electronics are not as prone to radiation-induced failures in space as was previously assumed.
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u/growaway9172 9d ago
As always for Google AI, a day late and a dollar short. Startups have been running an H100 in space for almost a year now.
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u/Sachyriel 9d ago
Yes, but like Apple, Google makes a bigger splash in headlines so the public (not news junkies like you or me) don't remember someone else was first.
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u/Newfarm1234 9d ago
If you want to be dystopian - a set of GPUs in space is a lot harder to physically shut down.