This idea is a total scam. This is just a way of asking investors for an enormous amount of money, with literally no intention of actually following through with it.

They might throw a couple of cheap satellites in orbit, just to say they "did it"...but no one with any actual comprehension of these things is honestly expecting it to yield results. The vast majority of that investment money, is going to be used for unrelated things.

In any sane world, this would be considered fraud. But, here we are.

No, it seems like you understand it perfectly.

It's a terribly inneficient idea, but it sounds futuristic, which is basically what Elon trades on to acquire government subsidies and investor buy-in.

My theory is that it's so they are beyond the reach of protesters, the law, etc. I think that is going to be a very in-demand property for servers going forward.

There's no reason, Musk is just bullshiting like with Mars colony by 2025.

You answered half of your own question.

"it would raise the value of rocket producers like SpaceX and Blue Origin."

The other thing is a complete lack of jurisdiction. At least theoretically, nobody can go after them for generating grossly illegal content in space.

Also, pure hypermasculine fetishism.

I believe Apartheid Pedo cited space being cold as a reason (ie don't have to worry about cooling the servers), except as usual he's a fuckwit with no idea what he's talking about. Space is empty, which means there's nothing to carry heat away, so the only way to lose heat is via radiation. And that takes forever.

The tech billiionaires got annoyed by regulations and complaints and are looking for a easier way.

They're harder for us to burn to the fucking ground if we can't reach them.

I feel like "data centers in spaaaaaaaace!" is an idea that could only come from someone completely removed from the day-to-day of how computers actually work. Like no matter how you slice it, these are physical objects that are going to need servicing by human beings fairly regularly. Putting them in space vastly complicates that process.

It's a shameless attempt to loop in their own assets to a free for all money spree. There is literally nothing about it that makes any sense. It would be more efficient to beam laser light back to earth to power a dc than this, and that's a stupid idea too.

They want to see if AI can still function while getting randomised bitflips?

Can't raid Elons CP database if its floating in space.

Ding ding!

• It's not better for cooling. - No air or water to dissipate heat.
• It's not better for communication. - Beaming data is always more lossy than its physically connected counterpart.
• It's not less expensive. - Just submerge it, or build closer to the poles with wind and solar to power it

Also, it throws more junk in our orbit, is more difficult to maintain and upgrade, and has a significantly more catastrophic fail result.

But why do things logically or sustainably when you* can make money?

* you = someone who already is hoarding a large portion of our wealth.

Solar energy is more efficient in space because there's no atmosphere and depending on the orbit can be in the sun for much, much longer than on earth over the day. Apparently you can beam the energy down to earth somehow, but you lose something like 50%. So the solution is to put the data center up where you get the power. The downside is that it costs a fuckton to send it up, cooling becomes an issue, temperature gradients become an issue, heat and cold cycles as it goes from sun to the dark side of earth is an issue, and the funnest part is that cosmic rays can fry electronics like GPUs.

I don't think it makes any sense either:

• Cooling will be large and expensive as hell
• Getting computers there will be expensive
• Getting solar cells there will be expensive
• The radiolink to earthbound networks will be expensive and slow

The only positive is that the energy will be cheap, and that the computers are safe except from nation state actors and untracked space debris.

I lean towards this being a narrative for the markets. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. claimed a 370 billion USD total addressable market (TAM) in space enabled solutions, and a 26.5 trillion USD TAM for AI in their S-1 filing before going public. They state within that their goal over time is to launch 100 gigawatts of compute to space each year.

By making the claim that this would be worthwhile they present themselves as uniquely positioned to profit from this situation. Moreso than other AI compute companies or other rocket launch companies.

Skynet. They want to build skynet. Go watch Terminator. I guess that's going to become a posthumous documentary.

• Global geographic coverage with very low dependence on local infrastructure
• Extremely difficult physical access compared with a conventional datacenter
• Enormous distributed sensor/communications/computing network
• Integration with Starlink's existing global communications infrastructure
• Resilience against localized disasters or attacks
• Direct access to governments and militaries that want autonomous communications, sensing, and computation
• Essentially uninterruptible power source
• Guided weapon systems, military intelligence and recon

Etc... come on. It's skynet! That's the funny thing you called a data center but really that's kind of the least of what's going on.

it would raise the stock value of rocket producers like SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Nailed it. Data centers in space is an objectively terrible idea but most people are too stupid to understand why. They see it as free real estate in the ignorance of the logistical problems of constructing structures in space large enough to be of any use, let alone powering and cooling them. The failure of the American education system has made the populace an easy hunting ground for modern Snake Oil salesmen.

Because they're money for space projects and some billionaire wants it.

Because it sounds like "future" to stupids.

As stated elsewhere it's a scam but their stated reason is because they want to build massive data centres on earth but there's a huge backlog in getting electricity for them. Even generating their own electricity is troublesome because every single natural gas/methane turbine is already spoken for years into the future and solar etc takes a lot of land which they may have trouble getting the rights to build on. Thus, if you could build in space you can theoretically collect a lot more solar and more strongly than what you get on the planet's surface. It just ignores all the other costly parts but I guess if you are being given unlimited money by venture capitalists what else are you going to promise them when they want more more more AI infrastructure

Right now, it's a terribly dumb idea. Here's why:

• Getting shit to space is expensive
• Cooling those data centers would require radiative cooling. The radiators for that would have to be crazy huge.
• It's economically unviable when you can build data centers on earth.

For me, this looks exactly like the "we're going to Mars, so invest in our space company, yipeeeee" thing.

That being said, could we see space based computation in the future? Sure. Again, here's why:

• It's more to do with simple energy consumption (not just for computation, but just energy consumption in general).
• Energy consumed still stays on the planet as heat. Slowly, it radiates away to space. The speed of radiation however scales with the surface area of the planet. Meaning, there's a strict upper limit of how much "energy consumption" we can do on earth before causing crazy global warming due to this waste heat. Note this is NOT green house gas caused warming. This is caused by more heat on the planetary surface than exiting. Waste heat
• Ok, so assuming that energy consumption increases 1% per year after the "exponential phase" begins, the planet Earth ITSELF would reach its limits from the standpoint of holding industry in less than a thousand years. The exponential phase for us seems to have started since the industrial revolution. Also, our current increase of energy consumption year over year is quite above 1%. Here's the paper.
• Hence, for environmental reasons, there would come a time in human history where we have to put our industry (which includes data centers) in space. Anywhere but Earth.

Could we develop systems with crazy efficiency? Sure. Maybe. I don't know. But even if we do, I can't see a case where the Hedonic treadmill wouldn't set in, still causing crazy energy consumption.

Hence, in conclusion, boo to current space companies grifting space based data centers. But yay to eventually putting all industry off planet.

Snake oil. As almost everything else.

There is zero economic reason. Most optimistic cost estimates are 5x more expensive than earth systems powered by solar and batteries. With near term optimism 10x more expensive.

The only reason is skynet that is immune for anyone in the US pulling the plug from skynet. Russia/China can already hit sattelites or terrestrial datacenters with missiles, and space ones are more vulnerable because Americans are more likely to cheer destruction of skynet assets used to oppress them.

The other factor is international law permits squatters rights to the most desirable orbits. 300 years from now, we may need power/data beemed to/from space. Privatizing it for oligarchy is a great long term investment if it is subsidized by US government.

Solar power and low latency laser communications.

Power is free* in space.

Communications between satellites is as fast as fast can be, fast enough that it can be faster to go earth-sat-sat-sat-earth than via fibre under the ocean.

The absolute con is that heat is really really hard to shed in space and it's really really expensive to get big heavy things to space.

So I can actually think of a few reasons: Preprocessing vast amounts of super high resolution satellite imagery to save bandwidth, and jurisdictional black site processing data some countries would want to steal or arrest you for having or processing, particularly if you were hiding it from internal audit. You would be paying an extreme premium over ground based for ever FLOP, so, the customer base of practical customers is limited to a handful of very well funded intelligence agencies or scientific projects in very niche use cases.

You just wouldn't. The ISS is the largest thing we've ever built in space previously. It has an internal area about equal to a 747 passenger jet. That's about 4800 sq ft, but the entire structure is about the size of a football field, with the solar panels needed to power it and whatnot - that's 57,800 sq ft total space taken up to get that 4800 sq ft. The average data center currently is around 100,000 sq ft. The ISS took about 1000 hours of space walking and 136 space flights to build. So we need 20 times the ISS to build one average data center, so 20,000 hours (that's a team of 10 people working 12 hour shifts for 166 days) of space walking to build, 2700 space flights, and it would^1^ take up over 1 million square feet of space in the sky.

OH, and that is completely ignoring the fact that ISS orbits earth in 90 minutes. Maintaining data transfer capabilities from that to Earth would be a nightmare and building a structure that big that close to Earth also means it's going to be BRIGHT in the night sky (like, ok, not as bright as a full moon or anything, but 20 times brighter than ISS which is the 3rd brightest thing in our night sky already... This data center would be well ahead and into the number 2 spot, you literally wouldn't be able to miss it).

OH OH, that is also ignoring how incredibly difficult it would be to cool. Cooling components on the ISS is one of the biggest challenges because there is nowhere for the heat to go. So add on hauling several million gallons of water to space every month I guess? I dunno what their plan would even look like for cooling that is such a monumental problem.

AND THAT IS JUST ONE AVERAGE DATA CENTER. The cost would be astronomical. The environmental impact would be devastating. The repercussions would be severe. The benefit would be almost non-existent and very short lived if there even was any.

^1^ - Ok, this is all napkin math based on what it took to build the ISS. Could it be done more efficiently the second time around? Maybe, but we aren't just talking about ISS 2: Electric Boogaloo either, we are talking about a giant 20x structure. Chances are it would be even worse than these estimates - and where the hell is SpaceX going to get the actual physical man-power to do the construction of this thing in orbit??

To get space data.

Transferring huge amount of data between space and earth's surface is costly and a big bottleneck. If you have a lot of data coming from space (satellite watches and listen to a lot of stuff) that needs processing, you can hit that bottleneck. Moving processing power into space removes it. Data transfer, using any kind of wave (even light) can be make way more efficient, so you can process a massive amount of data way faster, and only send back down there the result.

This has two obvious type of applications : useful for humanity, and dreadful for humanity. Think, doing weather forecast vs. using worldwide pinpoint tracking of any electronic device, including ones that don't necessarily have wireless capabilities. Guess which one will be prevalent.

Well, that, and doing a pump'n'dump with investors money, since for now the technology to do that reliably isn't really a thing, and spacex whitepaper just goes "yeah, we know this is a problem, we don't care".

ever heard of the Nazi bases on the moon?

yeah. that's why.

In space, no one can hear you brrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Perhaps an appropriate place for the billionaires to go. Go, fly with the AI, what could go wrong?

Cold nvm I'm stupid