Could space-based data centers be the answer to Earth’s energy and cooling challenges? NVIDIA’s H100 GPU is leading the charge in orbit.
data centers wouldn’t … require as much energy and water for cooling. They wouldn’t release warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere either.
How about you do AI via solar panels on earth instead? Oohh, it doesn’t scale you say? Too expensive you say?
By harnessing low-cost, nonstop solar energy and avoiding land use and fossil fuels
-
“low-cost” - Nothing about launching data centers into space is low cost
-
“nonstop solar energy” Continuous solar energy is certainly nice, but that is a pretty minor buff compared to current ways of making power. If you think nuclear or solar+battery is expensive, go calculate the price for space-based solar per GW…
-
“avoiding land use” - We have a fuckload of land outside of cities, build them outside of cities… Datacenter land use is removing a cup of water from the ocean.
-
“avoiding…fossil fuels” - You can achieve that on earth, nuclear or solar+battery…
In summary, this is probably the dumbest way to build data centers. It’s stated goals are better accomplished on land with nuclear or solar+battery. It really just feels like venture capital money trap.
It takes a lot of fossil fuels to push things to LEO let alone higher.
-
According to the International Energy Agency, the world’s data-crunching infrastructure is set to consume as much electricity by 2030 as the entire nation of Japan. Data centers also require enormous amounts of water for cooling—each day, a single 1-megawatt data center consumes as much water as about 1,000 people living in the developed world, World Economic Forum data suggests.
Also, goodbye stars, only datacenters and space junk now.
The map of space debris looks scary because each is displayed as the size of a country, while all together they would fit inside a single stadium.
Even a single bolt is not exactly fun when it hits you at several km/s
Ok, new app: estimate debris weight category, multiply with speed of debris, display dot size according to result.
Boo, the IEEE is shoveling Nvidia too?
This will be another massive fucking failure in the AI space.
Instead of making these dumbass and inefficient stacks they’ve all built this crap on MORE efficient, they’re like “Space is cold…sounds good.”
This planet is doomed.
so we will have to travel to space to kill the ai?
Space Cowboys here we go!
I read 6+ m ago that China are already doing tests with both deep sea and space compute. Nvidia isn’t leading.
Also: "With Starship, we’re expecting launch costs much lower.” Starship ?? Okay, then it will never happen.
