The number of political actors that can stop you from building in Morocco (or confiscate/damage your invested capital once you deploy it) are numerous. The number that can do so in space? Maybe a half dozen. We’re already seeing states and municipalities in the US moving to ban data centers and the energy infrastructure needed to power them. Building in space faces no such procedural roadblocks.
The economics still seem like an open question, but if the demand for compute is high enough, space based data centers might be the only option
> Yes, they know.
> Starlink is already planned for a scale of tens of thousands of satellites.
Meanwhile Google installed that many TPUs yesterday afternoon. The idea is still stupid.
Not sure about the cost perspective but, at least that makes more sense than a giant brick floating around.
[1]: https://lafibre.info/hetzner/over-200-000-servers-in-one-pla...
The availability of power is the constraint almost everywhere, no matter how much money you throw at it.
Gas turbine production has a many-year backlog. Everybody that can make the single-crystal superalloy turbine blades is fully booked for most of a decade and can't expand capacity for years (at least).
Meanwhile, putting a slightly larger solar panel onto a satellite is a trivial engineering excercise and has no blockers in 2026.
Disclaimer: Personally, I suspect all this AI-in-space "talk" from Elon is just cheap marketing to boost the IPO of xAI.
Is the sunlight millions of times brighter beyond the atmosphere? I don’t get it.
Also, there's a populist backlash on building datacenters, power transmission infra, and power generation in many areas on earth. Locally, we have a number of people complaining about solar arrays going up on farmland, even though it's the farmers choosing to do it. "It's an eyesore".
Only in a Sun-synchronous orbit, at specific elevations. Most 'normal' orbits have periods of shade.
Example of a spec sheet: https://signaturesolar.imagerelay.com/share/ffc69ee2265b4613...
If you mean the farmers' arrays, those are meant for commercial generation, so a good bit bigger, but one nice thing about solar is it's extremely modular, and you can fit it to the land. I believe bigger panels are more common for commercial, but I think it's a lot nicer to handle 40-50 pound panels than 70 pound panels.
Because panel cap factor is about 10-20% to begin because day and night exists on earth. Say you wanted to power it on solar + batteries and picked Australia. You pick place that has decent port and most exposure, i.e. Port Hedland. In winter, daily average drops by 20%. Also because atmosphere - 30% less insolation when compared to space. Finally add 10-45% cooling losses.
Which effectively means you need something at least 10-20x more panels + batteries to match space.