Thread

1. fwlr · 1790297624 · focus · HN ↗

   Yes, the physics are worse, and yes, the economics are worse, but data centers in space have the crucial advantage that they are out of range of the molotov-throwing arm of Joe Public (recently unemployed).

   1. thelastgallon · 1790304034 · focus · HN ↗

      Businesses run anywhere real money can be made. Middle east is the most volatile place. Yet, the businesses are perfectly okay building infrastructure to extract, refine and ship oil from there.

      If real money can be made, there is no need of datacenters in space. Offer some country some money and they'll let you build whatever you want. The whole idea is entirely unprofitable thats why they are making up things that won't work economically. Keep giving us money indefinitely, we'll keep spending, money can be made after a few decades of spending ... trust us.

      1. user43928 · 1790321269 · focus · HN ↗

         Your idea is that because AI or data centers are supposedly 'entirely unprofitable', they want to expend even more capital to do it in space with less profit?

         And somehow most of the replies seem to be about terrorism. What a comment section.

         I'd expect the discussion to be a bit more focused on the scalability and solar power..

         1. catlikesshrimp · 1790325134 · focus · HN ↗

            and "thermal radiation"

            1. TeMPOraL · 1790335367 · focus · HN ↗

               "But what about cooling?" is a tell-tale sign of people not knowing much about space systems and acting as experts.

               Cooling in space is a solved problem for these designs, by construction. They start with existing, flight-proven systems that handle some N KW of heat rejection in space, and shape they payload to require less than N KW of heat, meaning they can technically use existing design as platform and swap out the payload (there is devil in the details around integration here).

               That's why there's little weight in papers about this, and they instead focus on actually novel challenges (like operating ML hardware in high-radiation environments).

               But yes, I too expected the discussion to be more substantial. As it is, we have a rehash from discussion on that "ML in space" paper from ~6 months ago, which solved thermals by construction and explained how this makes economic sense, and people 100% ignored that, and all comments were a mix of "it makes no economic sense" and "have they thought about how to cool it?".

               *sigh*

               1. UncleMeat · 1790338299 · focus · HN ↗

                  "We know how to vent heat" and "we know how to vent enough heat that this becomes economical" are two different things. Can we deploy computers in space? Absolutely. Can we deploy a shitload of computers in space that are running extremely compute intensive tasks on a continuous basis?

                  1. TeMPOraL · 1790338487 · focus · HN ↗

                     That's the point I'm making.

                     > Can we deploy a shitload of computers

                     That's the "is it economical?" question, and to spoil the answer, "with the way launch prices have been dropping in last few years, yes".

                     (Also the larger question of "relative to datacenters on the ground" is answered by "yes, if you want clean power for it" - turns out moving compute up is more economical than beaming power from space, and costs down here are becoming dominated by land price anyway.)

                     > in space that are running extremely compute intensive tasks on a continuous basis?

                     "Extremely compute intensive tasks" is just elaborate and overspecific way of saying "requires N KW of power".

                     There is nothing magical about compute here, power is power - it doesn't matter whether you spend it on ML, or collecting photons and radioing them back to Earth, or broadcasting a high-precision clock. You need some N KW to run = you need to collect that much, and you need to reject that much of it as heat[0].

                     --

                     [0] - That + whatever extra heat you absorb from the Sun.

         2. fwlr · 1790394324 · focus · HN ↗

            I think you are dramatically underestimating the terrorism concern. From public news reports we know almost 400 Flock cameras have been destroyed in acts of widespread grassroots criminal vandalism, and I am sure Flock knows the much higher true number. Likewise for Waymo, we know of at least half a dozen vehicles destroyed and at least two dozen temporarily disabled, and I am similarly sure Waymo knows the much higher true number. From the point of view of a data center executive who has chatted to a Flock or Waymo executive at a social event in the last few years, the risk of vandalism/terrorism is neither hypothetical nor plausible, but literally real and already happening.

            1. user43928 · 1790406207 · focus · HN ↗

               I think you are dramatically overestimating it.

               It's one thing to vandalize some cameras or a driverless car in your neighborhood.

               Traveling to a large, potentially secured facility to commit terrorism is on another level.

               It being inside a building it is also much more difficult to damage and the consequences would be far greater.

               I'd think one would need strong motivations for such actions.

               A protest seems much more realistic, but I did not even hear of protests at data centers yet, only a small one at OpenAI headquarters.

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