The whole thing looks rather desperate. I wonder what SpaceX's margins are on these contracts.
If you buy into that business model (or pretend to), it makes sense for SpaceX to start selling compute early. Their "earthside compute" clients of today are "skyside compute" clients of tomorrow.
A part of Musk's old pitch for Starlink was: space-based solar makes perfect sense for powering space assets, and no sense whatsoever for powering Earth assets. So you have to find a way to use that power in space to do something economically useful. Comms were the only scalable way to do that, so Starlink it was.
I can see how space-based datacenters would follow the same logic. If SpaceX can make them economical, that is. There's no guarantees of that - but if anyone at all can make space-based datacenters economical, it's SpaceX.
Let's hope burning ten thousand tons of toxic e-waste annually in upper atmoshphere never becomes economical. Or mankind gets to senses and bans externalizing your e-waste problem by burning in atmosphere...
Expressing water usage in gallons makes it seem really large, too. NASA says[0]:
Scientists estimate that about 48.5 tons (44 tonnes or 44,000 kilograms) of meteoritic material falls on Earth each day.
I think we'll be fine. Pour all that frustrated energy you have into substantially reducing the amount of incredibly hazardous d-waste [3] big commercial operators burn up into our atmosphere, instead.
[0] <https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/meteors-meteorites/#h-...>
[1] According to [2] there are currently 10,413 satellites. At an assumed 1760 lbs each, this works out to roughly 10.4 tons.
[2] <https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html>
[3] "dino"-waste, AKA CO2
I did. what. the. hell? Maybe my swiss-cheese brain read the "," in 10,413 as a decimal separator? I guess that's what I get for posting while old. Thanks for the correction and supporting arithmetic.
Though, I still stand by my "please for the love of everything, get to complaining about CO2 because this thing you're complaining about is a damn nothingburger" conclusion. (I am sufficiently aware to notice that that you're not OP, so the "you" in that pseudoquote is not directed at you.)
Making use of that is predicated entirely on being able to put a lot of hardware into space cheaply. SpaceX is the undisputed best at that, no one comes close. The question is whether their "best" is good enough to make space datacenters economical.
Well, Earth orbit isn't.
It is definitely to escape most political pressures on Earth. They will never be able to sidestep the US feds, but aside from an open war with China or Russia, all other authorities are out of the game when it comes to space.
Which tells you something about why space data centers makes no sense.
There are sensors in space that send data to earth it gets processed and then the data is sent back to space then to the end user back on earth. If you do the compute in space you save the space-earth transfer time twice. Latency and availability of bandwidth are both factors.
There may be limited utility for this outside of military.
Evaporative cooling is the way it happens down on earth - and that shuttles h2o molecules from dense useful clumps like aquifers and rivers to a less useful form spread out in the air. But evaporating h2o isn’t an option in space afaik - since there’s a shortage of air to take up the h2o. In fact I think radiative cooling is the only actual option in space.
Looking forward to watching spacex defeat physics.
Compute is "free" at that point because waste heat is coming out of the total energy flux which was already accounted for (because we modeled it as opaque).
Of course swapping out the equipment poses a bit of a challenge. The "helping hands" rate is entirely unaffordable and wait until you see this new DC's physical access policies. 0/10 would not rack with them again.
Everybody knows.
Musk is a snake oil salesman (that’s been clear since the self-driving car promises) but he also has made a lot of people a lot of money and that’s all anybody really cares about.
None of his companies have a traditionally reasonable valuation. Is there any reason to think that’s going to change soon?
The reason people don't do it here is because it's too expensive.
But it doesn't matter since in this scenario each chassis is powered exclusively by the respective panel. How hot does a black panel sitting in the midday sun get? That's your equilibrium temperature. As long as it's within the operational limit of the device there's no problem.
The reason earthbound DCs are difficult to cool is because of density. When you match up panels to devices and shelter in their shadow you no longer have anywhere near the same power density.
A datacenter (earthbound or space) itself is a fantastical idea until a mix of events and inventions made it feasible to build them to sell compute.
It’s a engineering challenge not impossible.
After all, it's just an engineering challenge, not impossible.
Now if you have space based manufacturing or fuel production on the other hand ...
Its not a real argument it's just used because to most people the military is a big mysterious thing they don't understand which they think has an infinite budget for things.
In the Anthropic deal they have to be negative; Anthropic's announced higher margins during the deal.
Given extreme supply constraints, it's very unlikely that Google or Anthropic will just suddenly cancel right after the IPO unless their own demand collapses. And even if this were true, what value would that provide Musk? Could you imagine if your newly public company suddenly received termination notices from your two largest compute customers? Disaster.
Try logic.
What's desperate is announcing a temporary (allegedly) doubling of revenues days before an IPO that has been criticised for being overpriced at 93 times sales.
These data centers were supposed to serve xAI. Now suddenly they get rented out to others. Why the sudden change of plans?
It's either an emergency accounting gimmick or the effective shutdown or repurposing of xAI.
And once the compute crunch is over, they’ll have a lot of overprovisioned data centers with no business to soak up the capacity.
I don’t think their models are competitive with Google, and Google obviously has the best distribution imaginable, but they definitely are a competitor.
Of course this is a real deal. Compute is the most valuable resource in the world for these companies at the moment.