Oh is that all? Those are major data center concerns.
Don't forget the biggest one: an ocean-based system could be pulled up and serviced without the need for a human-rated rocket. Oh, and bandwidth/latency.
The ONLY benefit of space is that it doesn't require siting a major construction in a town full of angry residents, and it has abundant solar power. But given how much it costs to get the solar panels in orbit, that power sure ain't free.
As a side note, I don't understand why I keep seeing these wrong arguments on HN repeatedly. Like everything mentioned in this thread can easily be fact checked. Radiative cooling is solved, launch costs are going down, so power costs will pay themselves back very quickly, etc.
You can argue about specifics, like chips will get more sophisticated + power efficient and fabrication will be the true longterm bottleneck, or SMRs/fusion could reduce energy bottlenecks, but talking about cooling as if convective cooling is the only option is just nonsensical.
By that logic, climate change is also solved, just built a giant radiator.
"Just" is doing a lot of work there. SpaceX is planning to launch 100 GW of compute annually, that comes with ~ 2.5 square kilometers of radiator (assuming an optimistic 800K radiator temp and emissivity of 0.9, double sided)
Go for advanced carbon composites, you can do that with just 5,000 metrics tons or so of material. That's 34 starship launches just for the radiators. We haven't solved assembly, we haven't brought up power panels or core compute. Planned launch cadence that SpaceX hopes to reach end of this year: 12/year.
there is already a h100 in orbit
1GW of compute is a lot in 2026. comparing 100GW of annual compute to SpaceX 2026 goals does not make sense
if Starship launch cost predictions are accurate, data centers in space will happen within 10 years
1GW needs a pretty big area for radiation.
And in space your data centers is hard to defend against foreign actors
This is emphatically not true at any scale in which this scheme makes sense. Be careful with including too many Musk boosters in your information diet.
I've done builds that ran for 5+ years with virtually no physical attention, just continual degradation as hardware is taken out of service. There's also not much money to recover from 5+ year-old hardware.
I used to run AI inference GPU servers in road vehicles, which is probably an even harsher environment than a single rocket launch, and the vibration problems are real but solvable.
Also space has more radiation
I think this could be done at an interesting scale even on Falcon 9 alone. If Starship does even 20% of its early design goals, it'll beat Falcon 9 and we could see orbital servers being demised and replaced every 3 years, maybe even 2, for ones with abnormally high failure rates.
Now, whether or not this will all make money in the end has a lot to do with what's going on down here on terra firma and how long it takes to get useful capacity into orbit.
(It's taken 7 years to get Starlink capacity enough for serving 10M customers. Verizon FiOS did 10M in 5 years. AT&T Fiber took 4-5 years to deploy to 10M. So, space isn't a lot slower than terrestrial.)
But it depreciates faster. That fiber run is lasting for 50 years, not 5. You need 10x the installation capacity just to keep up.
The biggest issue with space is not repairability but heat - when you’re in a vacuum the only way to disperse heat is through black body radiation and that’s horribly slow compared with normal mechanisms. It means you need giant physical structures whose sole job is to accept heat from the processing core and radiate it away and have so much more material that you can radiate it at the speed you generate. It’s a huge unsolved physics problem which is why everyone is skeptical.
The problem with data centers in space is one of materials science and engineering: how to make radiators large enough and effective enough to cool it while also being economically feasible, both in terms of construction and getting them up there in the first place.
We can make a space data center right now. It would just be terrible and expensive.
The big win of being in space is just a worse alternative to using an intermediary heat transfer medium.
Definitely not definitive but it's plausible current hardware could survive with minimal modification
my question was more whether the hardware would need extra redundancy or shielding in order to not have unacceptably high error rates
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-buil...
You can figure out the weight of the thing based on the total power output, and "power to weight ratio" from SpaceX's own diagrams. Then look up how much it costs to launch per ton, and even look up what they are projecting it will cost with Starship. Even if they get costs down, it's still astronomical. I just can't figure out who would pay that much money to put a rack into space. There's no way the power savings are worth it. Unless you have some niche where you need your workload in space, I can't see the value at all.
I too agree that SPCX’s space business is real and valuable, but it’s (almost completely) irrelevant here.
All of the losses are from the xAI/Twitter side of the house. And Elon Musk needs a flimsy story so that no one sues him. It doesnt have to be a believable story, it just needs to be enough so that no lawyer cares to bring a case in Texas vs SpaceX and Elon for breach of fiduciary duty.
The story did its job. Elon offloaded the money losing Twitter/xAI out of his personal wealth and onto the public through SpaceX. Done and done. SpaceX is now an AI company (or contains one) and needs to perform as such.
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It's literally the same story as Tesla/Solar City. Make up bullshit about solar panel synergy with EVs and buy out his cousins failing company. Make it TSLA shareholders problem for figuring out how to make a profit from the failing company, it's no longer Kimball Musks concern since the buyout
Scott Manly (who I think is credible) has a video where he goes over the logistics of SpaceX's space based data centers. He seems to think its an idea worth pursuing, but its important to note that his expertise is space tech, and not business strategy.
Inference the latency becomes trivial.
Other things, I suspect latency is too high again.
Sooner or later it's going to leak.
Corrosion indeed is always a problem.
The ISS produces about 120 kilowatts of electricity.
An Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPU uses 1.2 kilowatts of electricity.
So, you would need a similar array of solar panels and radiators just to power 100 of them. You probably would need 2-3 launches for a satellite this big, and realistically, you would just make smaller satellites.
That's $4,000,000 worth of GPUs, A couple millon or more of RAM, SSDs, etc., a radiation-proof satellite housing to support all of that hardware, solar arrays, launch costs ($74M per Falcon launch), all for maintenance to be impossible and the hardware to become obsolete in a couple of years.
It's a delusion unless we invent some way to go to space for free.
SpaceX's launch cost, the internal spend to put one Falcon 9 Starlink payload in orbit, with a return to launch site booster recovery, is about $15M.
If you're going to make such assertions, do the legwork to make sure your numerical claims aren't off by 500%.
The thing has two main parts. One, a bunch of solar panels, shielding and radiators. This the heavy / expensive to launch part, but should last for what, decades? Two, a bunch of GPUs. These become obsolete, but so what? They're not that heavy, so every few years you send up another rocket and swap them out.
Even if we do somehow succeed at affordably dumping tons of GPUs into orbit, what do we do about the Kessler Syndrome?