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> but heat dissipation at scale in space is an insane engineering challenge, the tech to make giant radiators work doesn't exist yet, and even if it did it would extremely costly to develop and deploy

Different problem.

Cooling can be done in space, it's a normal problem; not easy, nothing in space is easy, but on the scale of space it is normal.

However, at the temperature you would run a chip at, a radiator you make for space will just work better, reject more heat, if you leave it on the ground.

We get convective cooling down here as well as radiative. At operational temperature, convection more than makes up for the atmosphere being a heat bath at ~20 C or whatever.

by spiderfarmer9 hours ago|

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Everything is possible. Doesn't mean you should do it. You can also put datacenters on the sea floor in a nuclear submarine. That might be even easier.

But does it make sense to do it?

No.

by Marha0113 hours ago|

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> t's not that it can't be done at all, but heat dissipation at scale in space is an insane engineering challenge, the tech to make giant radiators work doesn't exist yet, and even if it did it would extremely costly to develop and deploy.

You are overstating the engineering difficulty. Starlink constellation already dissipates around 100MW.

by fch4210 hours ago|

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If you solve your cooling problem in space by distributing 10000 servers across 100 orbits then you replace one engineering challenge with the next; good luck with the satellite-satellite optical crossbars, and even more with the time travel beam shapers to get the communication latency between the components of your "orbit-distributed data center" to-target.

(the sarcasm is intended; there are some usecases for "space servers", around stealth for sure; to "scale it like a terrestrial DC" though ... dunno; not matter how I turn it, it just seems crazy expensive)

by Marha019 hours ago|

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Communication latency and bandwidth would present big issues for AI satellites used for training. But if they are inference-only, then the latency and bandwidth demands are much, much lower. Starlink already demonstrates the required parameters.

by fch429 hours ago|

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Indeed ... yet the servers for that already exist and are largely ground-based - "edge" compute of the large CDNs through which much of the internet's traffic flows anyway.

Will starlink build its own edge ? Maybe. We'll see. Whether it makes sense to have this infrastructure "colocated in space" if you're not also the owner of the "connection infrastructure in space" though? It'll come down to cost. If I were anyone else but SpaceX ... that's where my eyes would be.