In a blog post, Musk said the acquisition was warranted because global electricity demand for AI cannot be met with “terrestrial solutions,” and Silicon Valley will soon need to build data centers in space to power its AI ambitions.
This dumb fuck. Unfortunately, his boosters will be all-in on this messaging. Whatever.
I used to think space data centers was a scam, but I learned how much power existing satellites already use (and thus must be able to radiate into space to keep cold), and just looking at the ISS, each radiator (and it has several) can reject 14 kW into space, so if the ISS has can safely generate 14 kW of electricity and reject all the waste heat, then the major concern for me is addressed. Space datacenters are the first step to industry, in space, which is an necessary step for a lot of future stuff.
All the above is beyond the point though, he’s playing shell games to tie his most valuable and critical company, SpaceX, to the trashheap of AI bullshit so that the government will bail him out when it crashes.
This is a tiny amount of power. My house alone has over 3x that (I have 48 kW of electric service). Feeding my house with 48 kW and dissipating the heat is MUCH MUCH MUCH cheaper than doing this on the ISS not once, not twice, but thrice on this ISS…just to achieve what my home achieves right now. And don’t think this is some odd amount for a home, this is a basic 200A home service line.
Space datacenters are a meme.
You don’t use 48 kW you have 48kW capacity, that’d be 33 (1500W) electric space heaters running nonstop 24/7. I have electric heat, electric oven/range, and an electric car and I averaged 3 kW across the last week. (406 kWh between the 26th and 1st)
A comparison that is reasonable is an h100 rack cluster like this which uses about 60 kW per rack. For input power, the newer iROSA solar panels generate about 20 kW at a size of 20ft x 60ft each. Throw in 4 of those radiators, and you have something that is feasible to throw into space. Again, I can’t judge the economics of launching and running a space based datacenter business, but you could absolutely launch and operate a space rack with current tech.
The ISS is one of the most expensive pieces of infrastructure humanity has built, it costs something on the order of $150B. My home I personally paid for, out of my own pocket, and it has 3x the power power supply of the ISS.
How about this. You give me 10% of the cost of the ISS and that datacenter rack, and I’ll use the $15,000,000,000 to buy a big AC system to cool the rack. We both make out. You paid 10x less and got 3x as much power capacity, and I got FIFTEEN BILLION DOLLARS to service and maintain a residential sized power line.
If you aren’t getting what I’m laying down. The issue isn’t the technology, the issue is the many orders of magnitude of extra cost.
The iss is an experiment rather than a commercially justifyable operation. While spacex aims to achieve 200$/kg launch costs, that means 17c/kwh just in launch costs. Space solar and radiator panels are in the $1000/m2 cost.
But data centers use tens to hundreds of megawatts. So we’re talking about thousands or tens of thousands of times the heat.
That was my stumbling block, too. Don’t think of it as taking a datacenter and putting it into space whole, think of it as taking 5 or 10 racks and putting that into space, and repeating till you have as much compute as a datacenter. So it’s basically the size of a schoolbus (same size as hubble telescope) and it has solar panels+ heat rejection like those of the ISS, and then bolt a starlink on the end, and you can put as many of those in orbit as you need.
Each part of the hardware is doable(ish), and if the nerds who actually run datacenters say the terrestrial energy/cooling cost numbers vs launch cost numbers make sense, I’m inclined to believe them even if I don’t get to see that math specifically. But right now it’s just AI bros saying the costs make sense, and I don’t as much believe them.
Yay! Unlimited space junk!
You’re right, but I don’t mind if he sends his stuff to outer space
The ISS is only in low orbit.