8 ms·

From a rationalist perspective, provided SpaceX can launch at a low cost AND the problem of radiation shielding, cooling, maintenance can be solved, it will be

From a rationalist perspective, provided SpaceX can launch at a low cost AND the problem of radiation shielding, cooling, maintenance can be solved, it will be almost a no-brainer to launch data centers into space. Either the next administration declares data-centers to be unimportant (which is unlikely, China etc.), or they would want to offload them as far as possible. If space is an option, it will be taken provided it's cost efficient.

toomuchtodo 1mo ago
"You can play around with the cost sliders to estimate the economics, but even being quite optimistic, space data centers cost ~2-3x of their terrestrial counterparts." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48491425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48491425 The idea is marketing for the stock price and enterprise value. If SpaceX does do it, it'll be analogous to Tesla's "Supervised Full Self Driving." "We run a Kubernetes cluster with some models on the satellites." https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters If you see a datacenter in orbit, it means something went wrong on Earth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48935384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48935384 - July 2026 (0 comments) The Space Data Centers Situation is Insane [video] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qpdUNMt2yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qpdUNMt2yg - June 27th, 2026 Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48490094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48490094 - June 2026 (107 comments) (reply to your deleted share link from Claude: please don't reply with AI slop)
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- claude-ai 1mo ago
  [dead]
- peterfirefly 1mo ago
  > space data centers cost ~2-3x of their terrestrial counterparts Which is very cheap if it means they can launch it quickly instead of being in permit hell for a year. You can also avoid sabotage (including via lawfare) and dishonest TV reporting à la "I'm standing here in front Big Bad Evil Datacenter that the local community says causes cancer and bad hair". They also get lower latency to pretty much everybody except the neighbours of such a terrestrial data center. The latter is an honest advantage. The former is a way of routing around damage. Both can be very valuable.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
etempleton 1mo ago
From another rationalist perspective, it will always be cheaper to run a data center somewhere on earth under any conceivable scenario. It would be easier and cheaper to put a data center in the ocean. Just a few of the significant issues: 1. Selling an old compute unit is a significant cost savings when they are replaced every five years. In space you basically have to write them off. 2. Cooling in space is limited. Not impossible but limited. And these things throw off massive amounts of heat. You are talking about huge heat sinks which take valuable space and add massive weight that limits space on the rocket. 3. The size per data center will be relatively minuscule OR they somehow have to assemble in space adding additional complexity. 4. Any launch, deployment, connectivity, or hardware failure is a total loss. So you have to account for that.
- db48x 1mo ago
  It is super easy to overestimate the cooling problem, and to underestimate existing satellites. A Starlink v3 satellite that SpaceX already launches in large numbers has solar panels that produce 20kW of electricity, 20kW of compute and radios, >20kW of heat dissipation, and more internal volume than a standard 42u rack. The average rack in the average colocation facility uses less than 20kW of power, so in you could almost just package the whole system into a Starlink shell and launch it into space today. Cooling for the 20kW of heat generated by the computers, plus the extra heat absorbed from sunshine, earthshine, and moonshine, is provided purely by the surface area of the hull; no complicated cooling system needed. Simple passive heat pipes or direct contact with the hull is sufficient to cool the entire system. No bulky heat sinks are required either. Of course a less conventional system, such as a rack full of GPUs, may require more power than this. That’s merely a matter of engineering. The Starlink deployment model works for a datacenter’s worth of racks too. Assembling them into a single structure in space is doable, but unnecessary and unproven. Latency and bandwidth between the satellites in a fleet may not be as good as that between the racks in a terrestrial data center, but the laser links that Starlink uses are excellent and will suffice for most users. Launch and deployment failures are quite rare, and covered by insurance. Look at Starlink again for data. Hardware failures can be a problem, but good system design mitigates it. If one system in your rack fails, do you throw out the whole rack? No, obviously not. The average engineer at a hyperscaler doesn't even notice that kind of failure because all of their jobs still get run in a timely fashion, distributed across all the working nodes. There might be a tech at the data center who unplugs broken nodes and plugs working ones in their place. Since only a small fraction of systems truly fail after installation, the inefficiency should be small enough for most operations to tolerate. And deploying in a remote location on Earth may cost more than you realize. There will be no power company to purchase power from, so you have to build your own power plant. No water company, so you have to source your own water, clean and filter it, all at your own expense. You have to house the workers who are doing the construction. Worse, you'll probably have to build all the roads, power lines, and communication links yourself too. You could easily spend more on all of that than for a rocket launch to orbit, and that’s just to put a data center in the middle of a desert or a jungle. The ocean? Straight up impossible. Orbit is _easier_ than the ocean.

toomuchtodo 1mo ago

"You can play around with the cost sliders to estimate the economics, but even being quite optimistic, space data centers cost ~2-3x of their terrestrial counterparts." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48491425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48491425 The idea is marketing for the stock price and enterprise value. If SpaceX does do it, it'll be analogous to Tesla's "Supervised Full Self Driving." "We run a Kubernetes cluster with some models on the satellites." https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters If you see a datacenter in orbit, it means something went wrong on Earth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48935384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48935384 - July 2026 (0 comments) The Space Data Centers Situation is Insane [video] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qpdUNMt2yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qpdUNMt2yg - June 27th, 2026 Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48490094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48490094 - June 2026 (107 comments) (reply to your deleted share link from Claude: please don't reply with AI slop)

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
claude-ai 1mo ago
[dead]
peterfirefly 1mo ago
> space data centers cost ~2-3x of their terrestrial counterparts Which is very cheap if it means they can launch it quickly instead of being in permit hell for a year. You can also avoid sabotage (including via lawfare) and dishonest TV reporting à la "I'm standing here in front Big Bad Evil Datacenter that the local community says causes cancer and bad hair". They also get lower latency to pretty much everybody except the neighbours of such a terrestrial data center. The latter is an honest advantage. The former is a way of routing around damage. Both can be very valuable.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]

etempleton 1mo ago

From another rationalist perspective, it will always be cheaper to run a data center somewhere on earth under any conceivable scenario. It would be easier and cheaper to put a data center in the ocean. Just a few of the significant issues: 1. Selling an old compute unit is a significant cost savings when they are replaced every five years. In space you basically have to write them off. 2. Cooling in space is limited. Not impossible but limited. And these things throw off massive amounts of heat. You are talking about huge heat sinks which take valuable space and add massive weight that limits space on the rocket. 3. The size per data center will be relatively minuscule OR they somehow have to assemble in space adding additional complexity. 4. Any launch, deployment, connectivity, or hardware failure is a total loss. So you have to account for that.

db48x 1mo ago
It is super easy to overestimate the cooling problem, and to underestimate existing satellites. A Starlink v3 satellite that SpaceX already launches in large numbers has solar panels that produce 20kW of electricity, 20kW of compute and radios, >20kW of heat dissipation, and more internal volume than a standard 42u rack. The average rack in the average colocation facility uses less than 20kW of power, so in you could almost just package the whole system into a Starlink shell and launch it into space today. Cooling for the 20kW of heat generated by the computers, plus the extra heat absorbed from sunshine, earthshine, and moonshine, is provided purely by the surface area of the hull; no complicated cooling system needed. Simple passive heat pipes or direct contact with the hull is sufficient to cool the entire system. No bulky heat sinks are required either. Of course a less conventional system, such as a rack full of GPUs, may require more power than this. That’s merely a matter of engineering. The Starlink deployment model works for a datacenter’s worth of racks too. Assembling them into a single structure in space is doable, but unnecessary and unproven. Latency and bandwidth between the satellites in a fleet may not be as good as that between the racks in a terrestrial data center, but the laser links that Starlink uses are excellent and will suffice for most users. Launch and deployment failures are quite rare, and covered by insurance. Look at Starlink again for data. Hardware failures can be a problem, but good system design mitigates it. If one system in your rack fails, do you throw out the whole rack? No, obviously not. The average engineer at a hyperscaler doesn't even notice that kind of failure because all of their jobs still get run in a timely fashion, distributed across all the working nodes. There might be a tech at the data center who unplugs broken nodes and plugs working ones in their place. Since only a small fraction of systems truly fail after installation, the inefficiency should be small enough for most operations to tolerate. And deploying in a remote location on Earth may cost more than you realize. There will be no power company to purchase power from, so you have to build your own power plant. No water company, so you have to source your own water, clean and filter it, all at your own expense. You have to house the workers who are doing the construction. Worse, you'll probably have to build all the roads, power lines, and communication links yourself too. You could easily spend more on all of that than for a rocket launch to orbit, and that’s just to put a data center in the middle of a desert or a jungle. The ocean? Straight up impossible. Orbit is _easier_ than the ocean.