Hacker News

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 models will maintain their dominant position, this will remain rack/row/facility level, which isn't viable for orbital facilities to handle as currently designed).

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 but existant 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).

The article makes several big assumptions that are questionable (experimental cooling can scale, permit issues on land will only become worse, etc). But more importantly, their analysis of the risks of placing a data center in orbit is completely off. They mention that it costs tens of millions to launch a missile to destroy a satellite, and it might be cheaper to simply replace it (based on launch costs). But one strike can hit many targets, those targets may contain hardware costing multiple times the value of their launch, and you will be out of compute while you scramble to launch a replacement. We can also assume that placing big fat valuable targets in space would have many actors wondering how to make it cheaper to destroy them.

For those reasons alone, and because compute will become more and more strategic for defense, I find it very hard to believe that data centers in space will represent even 5% of all compute in the next 10 years. I think a higher proportion will rather be underground or in bunkers than in space.

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.

The more I read HN the more I realize that I am more of an empiricist than a rationalist.

So many people here are opining as if they are correct. I have a large amount of doubt and I like the fact that the world is structured so that people can try things out and see if it works.

If the world was run by the naysayers in this thread, almost nothing would ever get done.

This premise always struck me as a solution in search of a problem, which when implemented introduces even more problems.

Even put launch cost aside and assuming the best case for starship, most of the whitepapers I've seen seem to hand-wave the weight, cost, and complexity of cooling. You need large panels with special coating, pumps, and pipes - and that will get hit with micro-meteors so you need redundancy.

Land based or even sea wave-based datacenters are all much more feasible.

You can put computers in space, but can you really call it a data centre at the scale that it can be done at?

Surely a single AWS/GCP/Azure/etc DC on earth is so big we won't be getting close to a similar amount of compute in space for the foreseeable?

The economic case also needs to be explained. What are people going to do with a DC in space?

The only use case for datacenter in space is to have high communication speed with satellites that have low compute. Though that does beg the question of why not just add more compute to those satellites going forward.

Remarkably few comments are engaging with the actual assumptions, arguments, and calculations in the article. Beware vibes, in both directions!

Perhaps companies should consider putting their data centers underground (out of sight and out of mind). Space seems incredibly expensive and risky in comparison.

Outside cost of launch I have understood that scaling it to sufficient power envelope with needed cooling is biggest step which most likely makes it unreasonable at scale. That is being able to use enough power to get reasonable amount of compute. Scale it small and low power enough and it is pretty simple. But at that point you might not be talking about amount of compute you expect.

Especially fun when you consider how often gigawatts are talked about with AI. And what that would mean just for cooling as in area... Or then dividing that to sufficient number of individual satellites...

Wouldn't it be cheaper to build a nuclear plant to power data centers than to launch the data centers into space? Nuclear is expensive, but rockets, orbital infrastructure, and giant cooling radiators aren't exactly budget options.

Google's paper on their Suncatcher project (where they recently put their TPU in orbit and received a response from a prompt) is pretty interesting to read:

https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(26)00362-4

Their blogpost is more "marketing-ish" but the videos are worth a watch too:

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/go...

We barely even have functioning trains or planes.

Outside of the physical, technical, and maintenance challenges of putting data centers in space, I simply don’t want more trash littering the night sky.

https://youtu.be/yZpbJJLk1ug

There's a lot of long shot assumptions here, but I feel the biggest is $250/kg launch costs (let alone $100 or $50).

The discussion of cooling in this piece is more convincing than I would have expected, but there remains a glaring social problem:

Should we consider orbit to be outside of terrestrial tax jurisdiction?

The majority of the cost of putting these data centres into orbit would be borne by terrestrial jurisdictions. The places that built institutions, funded education, provide medical care, etc. for the people who built these things. The environmental impact of building these data centres and launching them will be paid by those living on Earth's surface.

On Earth, we often fail to recoup many of these costs because of out-sourcing, but at least some other jurisdiction benefits. If a poor country is lifted up by the benefits of out-sourcing, at least some good has been done. If we let billionaires simply blast off and evade taxes, that's a net loss to the societies that made this possible with no benefit to anyone but the billionaires. That's fundamentally wrong.

Space may belong to no one nation, but neither is it true that space belongs to no one at all. The space around Earth belongs to all of humanity. Orbital data centres should pay terrestrial taxes. It's not clear where those taxes should go, but we need to hammer out the laws to make sure they are paid.

Wouldn't it be far cheaper to put DCs in offshore windmill parks? You have the power, cooling water abundant, fewer "NIMBY" than onshore DCs?

Is this already done?

How feasible would that be? Don't we have to bring down some satellites from the orbit at some point? How would that work if space datacenter has a limited time use?

What happens to all the rare earth materials once the space DC have been decommissioned? Isn't it a horrible waste of the already hard to come-by resources to send it to a disposable trash heap in space, all in the name of forever chasing profits?

It's really hard to get electronic "space grade" there is a lot more radiation there.

Also I wonder how long the ODC needs to operate to offset the energy spend on getting it in orbit.

Underground or in skyscrapers make more sense

For people selling the anti-sabotage / anti-datacenter-terrorism angle: the math doesn't work.

The energy needed to achieve orbital altitude is vastly less than the energy needed to reach orbit. About 1kg of rocket fuel will carry a small explosive and some tiny steel spheres to LEO altitude. The projectile will not be in orbit; it won't have escape velocity -- in fact it will briefly hit zero velocity (wrt the earth) at orbital altitude and then fall back to earth.

The very large cloud of shrapnel created will encompass LEO orbital height for several seconds. If an orbiting datacenter passes through the cloud during those seconds, the shrapnel will be moving at orbital velocity wrt the datacenter. In other words, just one piece will take it out.

With relatively simple rocketry (and, these days, an abliterated LLM to aid you) a dedicated luddite would have several opportunities per day to hit one of a constellation of satellites. If they wanted one very specific satellite they'd have one or two chances a year. The targeting and steering is not hard -- the orbital paths are publicly known and easily observable; you can use RF time-of-flight to implement exceptionally precise position/altitude/velocity measurements from the rocket (no need for GPS -- use your own transmitters on the ground). This is not hard. And it will only get easier as AI advances.

*I strongly discourage anybody reading this from doing the above.*

I'm posting it in order to show people that anti-sabotage is absolutely not a selling point for orbital datacenters. If anything, they are far more vulnerable to luddite attacks. The people channelling billions into this tech know this too. So their motive is something else. I don't know what, but it isn't this. The math doesn't work.

No

Simple answer, no.

Long answer, https://www.dia.mil/Portals/110/Images/News/Military_Powers_...

Earth has massive amounts of mostly unused land that is comparatively close enough by speed of light in fibre.

vs Space:

* Can drive a truck out there

* No limit on weight or dimensions (within reason)

* No giant explodey thing transporting it to into where it needs to be

* No constant falling towards the earth that needs to be averted with thrusters

* If building in the middle of nowhere there is also lots of space for solar panels

* Heat can be rejected into the atmosphere/earth/nearby bodies of water etc instead of radiation into the vacuum of space

* De-comissioning it doesn't also involve slamming a DC worth of mass into the atmosphere and burning up otherwise recyclable materials.

* You don't look like a doofus for doing bad math.

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.

> 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.

Underlying this seems to be the assumption that those pesky governments, pushed around by public opinion, will keep on blocking or delaying terrestrial data centres, but space-based ones will be fine.

The idea that launch rates could increase to the rates required to launch gigawatts of computing into space, without attracting a huge backlash, is fantasy. And such a backlash would be entirely justified - the only reason why the environmental effects of space launch aren't a focus of environmentalists is because there aren't many of them.

Just skipping to the Conclusions section, I find this article to be wildly biased toward space data centers. Some of this reasoning is ridiculous, insane.

For one thing, I think there's a huge assumption that we just can't make energy cheap on earth (Cost per GW). Solar/battery costs are plummeting, nuclear energy is still a great option (see: the quantity of in-progress Chinese nuclear power plant builds in progress, I think around 30 projects under construction right now), and we might just figure out fusion reactors one day soon.

"Favors: Earth today; Space later" - seems way too confident.

Land Use: Does this article just not realize how large the earth is? The earth will never run out of space for data centers. You can even put them in skyscrapers if you want.

Long-run scaling: How does this row make a lick of sense? This is a lot like saying that if I build my house in space then I could have 100 parking spots in my driveway. The problem is, I don't need 100 parking spaces in my driveway. Like, yeah, we know that there's infinite room to put stuff in space.

Carbon / local environmental burden: Another insane take on this subject. Are we really going to hand-wave over burning a shitload of rocket fuel to put stuff in space? "Favorable vs gas-backed terrestrial buildout" why are we comparing against a gas-backed buildout?

It will definitely happen and when it happens, HN will deny it happened, just like self-driving cars.

Do we need to? Do we want to? Who is "we" here?

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?

Solar wind and magnetic storm will fry the data center into space junk …

Even if they aren't financially viable, I think they're attractive because companies want to keep certain kinds of data/processing on everyone/everything someplace where there's a lower chance of government regulation (gdpr/etc).

If this is the case, I wouldn't be surprised to see them eventually support these kinds of regulations because it would enhance their moat (now earth orbit in addition to large capex for equipment and a sufficiently large user base).

I have a few qualms with this:

As a Linux user, I can already build such a system quite trivially by installing Debian on a Raspberry Pi, attaching it to a weather balloon, and setting up a cron job to maintain orbit. The cooling is handled by opening a window. From Windows or Mac, the balloon could be accessed through built-in software.

One cool possibility is superconductance with a number of materials.

The catches:

o Shielding from the sun's light and radiant heat.

o And efficiently radiating the system heat into space (since there is no air to convect or conduct the heat away).

So if launch costs drop 15x and radiator technology improves 12 to 30x and chip lose is improved 2x and there are absolutely no innovations that make terrestrial deployment cheaper, it's totally slightly cheaper!

Yes, for military reasons.

Even if data centres in space become cost-effective, what's the point? The only non-contrived answer that I can think of is to avoid NIMBYism, but pushback against data centres can't be that bad.

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 count as "data centers in space."

If we don’t put data centers in the North Pole or in Antarctica, I really doubt that we put data centers in space.

Only if launch costs fall to 10% of current costs.

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.

The real main purpose of putting data centers in space is not economic, and it’s not to guard against threats from major powers who could easily destroy them. It’s so that the ultra rich can have data centers that the rest of us cannot destroy. I make no argument about whether we should be thinking of doing so or not, but it is interesting to think of the implications is it not? And it certainly fits the personalities involved and their public statements.

Definitely need to see a Microsoft data centre in Uranus.

Sorry. Not sorry.

No.

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.