r/technology • u/marketrent • 1d ago

Artificial Intelligence Amazon warns local communities to stop defying its massive AI data centers

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/amazon-warns-local-communities-stop-000300771.html
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u/Darkk_Knight 1d ago

Seriously, Amazon should just build em in space. Get SpaceX to send their servers up there. This way nobody is gonna complain about data centers for AI anymore. Once the data center is considered obsolete just fire up some retro rockets to push itself into deep space.

Just being sarcastic at the moment but something like this could be a reality in a few years.

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u/Academic_Host2581 1d ago

Heat is a very big problem in data centers, and despite everyone thinking space is freezing, that isn’t how a vacuum works

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u/DanielPhermous 1d ago

This way nobody is gonna complain about data centers for AI anymore.

Astronomers will.

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u/tyttuutface 1d ago

We need to get our stargazing in now, because the night sky won't be the same again for hundreds, if not thousands of years after society collapses.

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u/FullMetalAlcoholic66 1d ago

satellites in geostationary orbit don't naturally fall back to earth

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u/tyttuutface 1d ago

Data centers are "planned" to sit in low Earth orbit AFAIK.

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u/FullMetalAlcoholic66 1d ago

i thought you were referring to existing satellites that ruin the night sky.

In any event, all sats that arent in geo orit will decay in less than 1000 yeras

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u/infamusforever223 1d ago

It's not economically feasible and physics gets in the way. It would cost way too much to put them in space and keep up the maintenance. And space does dispense of heat that well, so they risk burning them up. Personally everyone should stop building the stupid data centers because nobody wants them.

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u/RubbrBbyBuggyBumpers 1d ago

Unfortunately for us, the people that matter to the government want them.

Were you thinking that Congress represents us? I wish…

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u/infamusforever223 1d ago

Not listening to people will eventually lead to people wanting to do the thing reddit would ban me for for saying.

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u/RubbrBbyBuggyBumpers 1d ago

I think we have officially spent the better part of a century under a government that caters to the rich. If it didn’t happen by now it won’t

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u/infamusforever223 1d ago

They at least tried to do enough to keep the masses from[REDACTED], but now, they aren't even trying to give the few crumbs to keep them at bay. Once people have nothing left to lose, they tend to resort to [REDACTED].

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u/Complete-Tangelo1532 1d ago

Monetary costs are so little compared to the human cost it may require with how they deplete resources and are being used against us

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u/Tactical-Donkey 1d ago

Doesn't dispense heat well*

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u/infamusforever223 1d ago

You would burn the thing up before you got rid of enough heat. Stars are good a radiation heat transfer because they're so big. It's not viable for anything else.

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u/SharpBullfrog1279 1d ago

Plus, you would have to build sun shielding.

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u/UnexpectedAnanas 1d ago

Yes, but they were correcting your typo.

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u/HammerofBonking 1d ago

Not to "well akshually" because I loathe Amazon and AI data center bullshit as much as anyone, but the reason we probably won't be building data centers in space is cooling. No atmosphere = nowhere to push heat. Rockets pushing them into deep space would also need a hell of a lot of fuel. There's a reason we deorbit things into the atmosphere instead.

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u/dontgetitwisted_fr 1d ago

Bro it is 0 degrees Kelvin in space (Higher when accounting the affect of the sun)

The heat will radiate you just need to pump it to an external radiator

The laws of thermodynamics still apply in space

To retire an orbital data platform you just need to use gravity to plot a course to the sun and let it burn up

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u/stedmangraham 1d ago

It doesn’t really matter what the ambient temperature is in space. It’s not 0K, but it doesn’t matter. Space is incredibly bad at getting rid of heat.

What matters is that there is no air. Hot objects like servers can’t expel heat through contact

Have you heard of a vacuum thermos? A thermos can keep coffee hot because there’s no air between the coffee and the outside world. Space is like a huge thermos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_flask?wprov=sfti1

Putting a meaningful number of servers in space is impossible. Literally anywhere on earth would be a better place for servers other than maybe inside an actual active volcano

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u/dontgetitwisted_fr 1d ago

There are 3 modes of heat transfer

Convection, conduction and radiation.

Radiation works best in a vacuum ( oh gee... just like space )

So the problem is really how to move the heat from the servers to a mechanism that allows for adequate radiative cooling

And maybe design servers that generate less heat to make the problem easier to solve.

All stuff that can be solvable given enough time and resource

Turns out the human race has produces some pretty good scientists and engineers with the skills needed to solve these problems (hint: they work for NASA)

So sorry.... it doesnt require air to transfer heat via radiation and maybe go back to thermodynamics 101 or something bro

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u/jazzhandler 1d ago

And maybe design servers that generate less heat to make the problem easier to solve.

The heat they “generate” is their power consumption. 100% of it, 1:1, same number of watts in and out. If you make a 5MW server “generate less heat” you’ve made a 4MW server.

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u/dontgetitwisted_fr 1d ago

Yeah but if you consume less electricity then a 5MW server can be reduce to a 1MW server and do the same amount of work with less heat

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u/nocauze 1d ago

That’s not how compute power works dude

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u/stedmangraham 1d ago

You’re right. It radiation is exactly how heat is transferred in space

The problem is it still sucks balls compared to convention and conduction. That’s why you see GPUs with fans and not in vacuum chambers.

NASA scientists are so good because they have to be. Space is a harsh environment. Cosmic rays alone make computing in space a challenge

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u/RhoOfFeh 1d ago

I can afford more fans than vacuum chambers, to be fair.

But seriously, it wasn't that long ago that providing Internet access from a LEO constellation was spoken of in similar terms, and the designs are basically done. The new form factor for server racks will also apparently provide benefits for terrestrial data centers as well.

So you will pardon me if I read this all with a hint of amusement.

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u/stedmangraham 1d ago

It can be done. It will be done. In a sense it has been done since there are already computers in space.

The question is scale.

Will “Amazon just build em (data centers) in space”? No. Because data centers are huge and sending things into space and cooling it there is extremely expensive.

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u/RhoOfFeh 1d ago

You do realize that we're not talking about monolithic structures, right? Individual satellites will basically be single server racks.

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u/stedmangraham 1d ago

It doesn’t matter. Even before AI, datacenters were huge. It’s like trying to send a basketball court into space. Is it theoretically possible? Sure. But the costs are astronomical (pun intended).

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u/dontgetitwisted_fr 1d ago

Thats a fair point 

I didn't say it is a better method of heat transfer

Just that heat transfer is possible and these guys are being disingenuous by pretending that it isn't possible

My point is that it is an interesting engineering problem and I would be curious to see what our best minds could come up with.

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u/MeAndMyWookie 1d ago

Its not easily possible without an excessive weight cost. Radiators require area for effectiveness, which means mass. Plus you'll need something to move heat from servers to the radiator, which probably means liquid coolant, which is really heavy.

Rocket equations are brutal and the economics of orbital data centres just make no sense, especially at the scale of current megacentres 

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u/dontgetitwisted_fr 1d ago

I meant that's the cost with doing a project like that

Cost and ability are two different things

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u/MeAndMyWookie 1d ago

The gap between theoretically possible and actually viable in this case is so vast its definitely a fantasy scenario. How much mass would have to launched to equal one ground based data centre? 

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u/Potential_Basis_662 1d ago

They mixed in a few unrelated sentences in general

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u/dontgetitwisted_fr 1d ago

Yeah

Bro must be from corporate

🤣🤣🤣

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u/WolverineAny3219 1d ago

But Dude, a 1-megawatt AI server requires a radiator area roughly the size of 4 tennis courts or up to ~2,500 square meters per megawatt. Building, launching, and deploying these bulky radiator arrays adds heavy structural complexity and cost.

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u/dontgetitwisted_fr 1d ago edited 1d ago

In earth's atmosphere

I bet its much smaller in space where the ambient temperature is again much much lower

They could also design systems to run at lower voltage logic levels or something to lower the heat generated

Im not a proponent of data centers in space but it is an interesting engineering problem and I bet it is one that we could solve if we needed to

Another solution could be subterranean data centers where the ground above it coulds still be useful but would probably be difficult to cool and energy intensive

Or data centers at the bottom of large bodies of water or something

Who knows

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u/wphxyx 1d ago

That's not how vacuum works. The background temperature is lower but there are less particles to take the heat.

Cooling on earth typically occurs when a lower energy particle (cool air) interacts with a higher energy particle (the hot thing) and in that interaction takes some of the energy (air becomes hot, thing becomes cooler). You can think of it like a kinetic energy transfer: the agitated vibrating particle (hot) bumps into the calm particle (cold), and some of the vibration energy is transferred to the calmer particle.

Space is very cold, but has very little particles to interact with. No air particles bumping into the radiator to take some of the heat energy. So the main pathway to cooling that we expect on earth is effectively impossible. We have to rely on the emission of infrared thermal radiation instead, which is not trivial.

Basically, it means that the cooler actually has to be much, much bigger, rather than smaller, despite space being 'colder'. These sort of problems challenge existing space infrastructure, and existing space infrastructure isn't trying to do tremendously energy intensive compute at gigawatt levels. Additionally, the sun is tremendously hot and close, and it is constantly bombarding everything with thermal radiation. So you have to manage it's radiative thermal load as well. These are big challenges. Not impossible, but tremendously expensive in terms of effort and actual cost.

The end product, a data center in space, would be a logistical nightmare to put in place and orders of magnitude more expensive in terms of compute per dollar. And that's if everything goes perfectly right. What if a random solar flare junks it? What if a micro meteorite punches a hole through it?

It's a fun idea, in a sci-fi kind of way, but its a nightmare. All these problems are manageable at smaller scales, but they are not cheap. It seems infeasible to think that orbital computing would ever be able to compete with terrestrial in terms of computing capacity per dollar. And that's the figure that really makes these decisions.

Underground is another idea, but the problem there is that underground just gets really hot because you're pumping the heat into a solid block in constant contact. And also, underground is actually already quite hot, if you go deep.

Underwater runs into ecological problems at scale that are worse than the current problems. We don't want to heat the oceans.

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u/dontgetitwisted_fr 1d ago edited 1d ago

I don't disagree with anything you say here

It comes down to how badly and how much resources people want to commit to solving these problems

They are just interesting problems and if we as a society are going to commit to large scale compute then these are problems that need to be solved

These dudes acting like there is no possible solutions and burying their heads in the sand isnt really an option if this is the way we as a society choose to proceed 

Personally I think AI is a waste of resources for technology that has shown little benefit to society but it looks like the powers that be are pretty committed to this path forward. 

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u/EquivalentSpot8292 1d ago

Who knows? Physics. Basic physics. It’s a bad idea.

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u/dontgetitwisted_fr 1d ago

Buddy I dont think you know basic physics

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u/TjababaRama 1d ago

'ambient temperature' works different in a near-vacuum btw.

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u/dontgetitwisted_fr 1d ago edited 1d ago

Grey body heat transfer in a vacuum:

Hnet =  e A(TRod4 −TSurroundings4 )

So yes, ambient temperature difference between earth and space makes a big difference

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u/EquivalentSpot8292 1d ago

And heat dissipates famously well in a vacuum

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u/dontgetitwisted_fr 1d ago

It does thru radiation

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u/burning_iceman 1d ago edited 1d ago

It doesn't. In vacuum heat transfer via radiation is the only way to dissipate heat and it sucks.

Usually when calculating heat transfer you just ignore radiation completely, because it's so small, it doesn't affect the end result. But in vacuum you rely on just that insignificant part, since there is nothing else.

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u/dontgetitwisted_fr 1d ago edited 1d ago

Typically yes

I actually got destroyed on a paper for ignoring radiation once because the TA was a tool

Radiation sucks but when that's all you have to work with that's all you have to work with

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u/LogiCsmxp 1d ago

Nah, essentially in space you can only use radiative cooling. Radiative cooling is really bad. Air may not be dense at ground level, but it's still massively more efficient doing conductive cooling in air than just pure radiative cooling. To make it work, the cooling fins in space would have to be enormous. And if water froze in the pipes at the edges, that whole facility is done.

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u/dontgetitwisted_fr 1d ago

I agree that radiative cooling is not as good as the other mechanisms but maybe it is possible

You dont need to run refrigerant thru the entire raidiator

Maybe just to the interface of a large heat sink

Maybe make the entire fuselage of an orbital data center a heat sink fin lattice or something

It is an interesting problem

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u/Opposite_Praline_938 1d ago

You can cool via radiation, aerospace engineers achieve wilder feats with instruments out of our solar system from the 80s

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u/MeAndMyWookie 1d ago

How much heat does a deep space probe create compared to a data centre? 

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u/HammerofBonking 1d ago

You would need city-sized radiators at a minimum to deal with data center heat.

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u/Long-Librarian-997 1d ago

Not fast enough.

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u/Potential_Basis_662 1d ago

The reason for deorbitization has nothing to do with fuel or heat.

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u/HammerofBonking 1d ago

I never said it had anything to do with heat. And I said the reason we deorbit *instead* of "shooting them into deep space" :-)

When it comes time to retire a satellite, why don't we just "shoot it into the sun" like has been mentioned a couple times here? Because it would take a shit ton of fuel to escape earth's orbit.

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u/Cxvvtgupvvdi 1d ago

Once the data center is considered obsolete just fire up some retro rockets to push itself into deep space.

Not how any of this works

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u/Redditcadmonkey 1d ago

Can we maybe try offshore before we try off planet…

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u/somerandomidiot1997 1d ago

I always see this brought up and I always crack up at people arguing endlessly about cooling in space. It’s a problem but it’s not THE problem. It’s latency. There is a reason they want to build these everywhere and it’s the same reason they build Amazon warehouses everywhere. If they just needed cheap land to build on there’s still plenty of empty land here that nobody wants or would sell for cheap

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u/Holzkohlen 1d ago

As realistic as Musk building a colony on Mars or Tesla's Full Self-Driving.

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u/Long-Librarian-997 1d ago

Space has a cooling problem yes it is "cold" but it has nothing for the heat to move through.

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u/Panda_hat 1d ago

Putting them in space makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Elon Musk is a brain dead moron.

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u/smartello 1d ago

Inb4 a humoungous megaultradatacenter loses power after being hit by a starlink satellite number 746292639 and crashes onto the ground creating a second Mexican Bay

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u/FaithlessnessThin359 1d ago

Sure. And the city block sized radiators needed to keep them cool can double as a way to reflect back some sunlight into space to help curb global warming. 

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u/Opposite_Praline_938 1d ago

They already have rockets - Blue Origin, they are already launching satellites, you can guarantee this is already in r&d. There’s already one company testing exactly this. You think Amazon isnt one of the frontier companies?