My understanding:
- b/c of geothermal, huge amounts of electricity are available for low cost
- Iceland being an island makes it VERY expensive to build/transport goods back and forth
- The above combo means that aluminum smelting is the only industry where the electricity availability outweighed the costs of transport and being on an island.
We already have transatlantic fiber optic cables so I don’t see why “transportation” costs apply here though
Which might be true, though the second thing sounds promising as well...
There are other incentives driving this, I suspect more so. Pushback, land acquisition, grid hookup, legal concerns - many circumvented by going to space.
are you expecting us to not do have more compute in space every year?
the pace of space access is accelerating while the cost is decreasing
For compute jobs that can be efficiently farmed out to individual racks, this is a nice way to stretch your PV manufacturing capacity to serve more chips (as long as launch costs aren't too high).
For LLM training and other jobs that need an entire datacenter of racks working in parallel, that wouldn't be feasible to do in space with today's technology.