YHK - yet another hacker news clone

The only place where a space data center makes sense is in Mars orbit to reduce the amount of mass that needs to be landed. Every thing else is a smoke and mirrors game to justify rolling a bunch of failed businesses into SpaceX.

No.

Definitely need to see a Microsoft data centre in Uranus.

Sorry. Not sorry.

From the article:

Conclusions

Orbital data centers look more viable than we expected going in and the case rests primarily on launch cost. The engineering challenges seem significant but none appear intractable. Commercial off-the-shelf solar, passive radiators, and standard error-correcting codes seem sufficient for a baseline architecture. We expect limited demos and shipments of compute to orbit in the coming years but our best estimate is that orbital data centers are unlikely to represent a meaningful share of compute before 2030. They might scale quickly thereafter however, and are more likely to be bottlenecked by chip production rates rather than by launch cadence. A generally important dynamic is that terrestrial data centers likely face headwinds that worsen as compute scales up while orbital data centers face constraints that relax with scale.

We kinda already have IMO.

Starcloud-1 is already in orbit, and many other plans by them and other firms are already well into development.

And Lonestar has a backup server on the moon. Seriously.

I fail to see the economic case. You will need very large solar arrays and radiation hardened components, both of which make it uneconomical compared to a data center on Earth. This is another of Musk's genius ideas like the tunnels that were supposed to be carrying us under cities by now.

I thought this was one of these joke websites that just say "No."

I mean, Elon will probably shoot some GPUs up there and call it a success, but I'm not sure that should could at "data centers in space."

No we will not. The reason is simple: Space is not in the cloud, it is above. Anything that's not in the cloud is bad.

Silliness aside, has anyone come up with a cooling system that would work well for a friggin data center in space? Or is it still all just a wishful thinking game, ignoring physics?

> and becomes cheaper than any current terrestrial energy source at around $50/kg

Heck for $50/kg I could see it, too. Now with Falcon 9 or Heavy it's on the order of thousands, isn't it? Just need a measly two orders of magnitude improvement and then we can start talking.

The viability of space DCs seem to depend entirely on the existence of higher latency, lower throughput, single card to single server workloads, which IMO isn't the primary class of workload today (and if one holds the belief that frontier will maintain their dominant position, this will remain rack/row/facility level, which isn't viable for orbital facilities to handle).

If that workload does expand in usage, and the economics of orbital DCs make sense (with high launch costs, zero ability to do maintenance, and weight penalties for shielding and radiators), then surely ocean based data centers (e.g. Panthalassa) make more sense (lower 'launch' costs, high latency on maintenance, no weight penalties), and if those make sense then surely the distributed land based facilities (e.g. Rune Energy) or home based facilities (e.g. Span XFRA) make even more sense (easier maintenance, low/no permitting overhead because they're covered by existing permits, reasonable quality terrestrial fiber internet).