Here's some thoughts trying to steelman this idea.<p>Firstly, let's note that the founding team is certainly not inexperienced. One of them has worked at both SpaceX and Microsoft on the datacenter side, one claims to have 10 years of experience designing satellites at AirBus and he has a PhD in materials science. And the CEO has a business background mostly but also worked on US national security satellite projects (albeit, at McKinsey).<p>They make a big deal of it being about AI training but it would seem like inference is a much better target to aim for. Training clusters are much harder than inference to build, the hardware obsoletes quicker, they have much higher inter-node connectivity, you need ultra-high bandwidth access to massive datasets and you therefore need a large cluster before anything is useful at all. Inference is a much easier problem. Nodes can work independently, the bandwidth needs are minimal and latency hardly matters either as there is an ever increasing number of customers who use inference in batch jobs. Offloading inference to the sky means the GPUs and power loads that <i>do</i> remain on earth can be fully dedicated to training instead of serving, which dodges power constraints on land for a while longer (potentially for as long as needed, as we don't know training will continue to scale up its compute needs whereas we can be fairly confident inference will).<p>If you target inference then instead of needing square kilometers of solar and radiator you can get away with a constellation of much smaller craft that scale up horizontally instead of vertically. Component failures are also handled easily, just like for any other satellite. Just stop sending requests to those units and deorbit them when enough internal components have failed. Most GPU failures in the datacenter are silicon or transceiver failures due to high levels of thermal cycling anyway, and if you focus on batch inference you can keep the thermal load very steady by using buffering on the ground to smooth out submission spikes.<p>Ionising radiation isn't necessarily a problem. As they note, AI is non-deterministic anyway and software architectures are designed to resilient to transient computation errors. Only the deterministic parts like regular CPUs need to be rad-hardened. Because you aren't going to maintain the components anyway you get possibilities that wouldn't make sense on earth,<p>A focus on inference has yet another advantage w.r.t. heat management. For training right now the only game in town is either TPUs (not available to be put on a satellite) or Nvidia GPUs (designed for unlimited power/cooling availability). For inference though there is a wider range of chips available, some of which are designed for mobile use cases where energy and thermal efficiency is prime. You could even design your own ASICs that trade off latency vs energy usage to reduce your energy/cooling needs in space.<p>Finally, although heat management in space is classically dealt with using radiators, if launch costs get really low you could potentially consider alternative approaches like droplet radiators or by concentrating heat into physical materials that are then ejected over the oceans. Because the satellites are unmanned it opens up the possibility of using dangerous materials for cooling that wouldn't normally be reasonable, like hydrogen or liquid sodium. This would mean regular "recooling runs" but if launch costs get low enough, maybe that's actually feasible to imagine.
<p><pre><code> Data centers in space use 24/7 solar power
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Maybe I’m just missing something obvious, but how exactly do you get 24/7 solar coverage in space? Surely they don’t propose launching all this stuff beyond LEO…?<p>EDIT: they cover it later on; if you think about it you can orbit on the exact line that is perpendicular to both the equator and the direction of the sun, and then have the orbit progress perfectly in sync with the earth’s orbit (`365.25/360`° of longitude drift per day) so that it’s always on this special orbit. So it’s like GEO but (presumably…?) way harder to maintain, and slightly more exclusive (how many could you safely pack in a constellation?). Not to mention the need to account for all the other LEO satellites to dodge this 4km wide square, and the much higher (presumably??) risk of debris/dust collisions.<p>This seems like a hat on top of a hat on top of a thousand hats, but Godspeed you mad geniuses. I would love to see this some day, perhaps if/when AGI trivializes some of the problems involved!<p>PS if my napkin math is right (`tan(4/800)*60` = 0.005 arc minutes) it wouldn’t be visible to the human eye at typical LEO altitudes, a threshold that Wikipedia puts around 0.5 arc minutes. We can pump those numbers up! As-is it would certainly be a sight to behold every day at dawn and dusk, that’s for sure…
Last month John Carmack was also suggesting that the idea of chip manufacturing in space might be worth exploring [0]. It would be interesting to hear from any experts if the idea has any merit; perhaps it could help unlock new manufacturing techniques?<p>I only skimmed the linked PDF but did they write anything about the risks or challenges of deploying consumer hardware into space? Is space-hardened hardware not required?<p>[0] <a href="https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1821689022881636554" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1821689022881636554</a>
Not talked about beyond heat is maintenance. When things fail, who are you going to send up to fix things? Is it never going to fail, or are they planning to throw away big components or are there going to need to be servicing missions?
Nice idea.<p>Why not build the data center for general use in space as well? The companies that build data center certainly have enough resources to pull off something like this. What's stopping them?
> Cooling not required [in space]<p>Either they are stupid or lying. Both doesn't make them look good.<p>Also omitting costs like:<p>- RND. You are unlikely to use off the shelve parts for cooling (radiators?), communications, fire safety, thrusters, you are basically building a satellite for a thing nobody has done before<p>- maintenance mechanisms. You can't just send a guy to replace the radiation hardened SSD and if you do, congrats you have to build a space station. You <i>could</i> just let it die, but then the math will math different in comparison to a terrestrial data center<p>- operational costs of satellite control personal and ground stations. Crunching AI in space is nice, but last time I checked the state of AI it needed tons of training data. Have fun paying for that connection into a orbit that has 24/7 solar, as earth is spinning below. Radio stations across the globe.<p>And these are just unmentioned costs a non-space self-thought tech person came up with in 5 minutes. Don't invest into people this incompetent or malicicious.
> Table 1: Cost comparison of a single 40MW cluster operated for 10 years in space vs on land…<p>> Cooling (water usage): Land: 1.7m tons vs. Space: None<p>They completely ignore the cost of 40MW of radiative cooling in the “Cost comparison” table. Then they have a section saying “we’re inventing something to dissipate gigawatts of energy into space.”<p>So the cost comparison is entirely misleading, and that critical lie by omission makes it very hard to take them at face value about literally anything else.
This is really stupid. All the resources going into this could be used for a million better things.<p>But...<p>Its pretty cool, and I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from thinking about the possibility of actualizing their wildest imaginations. Just, you know, think bigger.
I saw a few posts about this and thought it was a joke. This tweet sums it up:<p><i>YC company announces a giant data center in space</i><p><i>Startup Twitter: Makes so much sense, it will be so easy to cool in space!</i><p><i>Space Twitter: How the hell are they proposing to keep it cool??</i><p><a href="https://x.com/mouthofmorrison/status/1831680658927669632" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/mouthofmorrison/status/1831680658927669632</a>
NASA (used to) host a Space Settlement design competition for high school students, I submitted and won when I was in school. I am pretty sure I and other winners wrote proposals with fewer gaping scientific holes than this lol. Apparently that gets funding now.