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.
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.
If your argument was one of cost, you should have said so from the start! Economically, it might or might not make sense. I can’t pretend to know the economics of running a space based datacenter, I’ve never run a ground based datacenter.
But you have been arguing about power and electricity and heat and how proud you are to have 200a service at your house (congrats on owning it, btw, tough nowadays) but those aren’t the dealbreakers. If the AI bros want to lose billions putting the datacenters in space, I don’t have a huge problem with that. Better that than diddling kids and destroying society, which is what they seem to be spending their money on now.