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Serious question, do you think that all of these engineering organizations who are going all in on this concept haven't done the math themselves?
I was skeptical about the cooling issue myself but I did the math myself and it turns out that if you're willing to run your chips a little hot you can get away with less radiator surface area than solar panel surface area. It's simply not the issue that people seem to think it is.
The math not mathing hasn't stopped repeated attempts at solar roadways (and solar railways, etc.). Sure, you can technically cover the road with solar panels and get some amount of power out of them, but for far less money you can get far more power by just building them in an empty field or the desert etc.
Similarly, you technically can run a datacenter in space, but it gives you effectively zero advantage over a terrestrial one (or even exotic ideas like building them out on the ocean or in Antarctica) while adding tremendous amounts of cost and complexity. I mean, I guess you get twice the amount of power per square meter of solar panels, at only an order of magnitude or two higher delivery and installation costs. And you don't really escape terrestrial legal jurisdictions any better than you would have by building the DC on a container ship out in the Pacific or something.
It's a retarded idea being pushed because it hypes normies and other retards (like venture capitalists).
Antarctica is closed to economic exploitation by international treaty. It's the complete opposite of escaping terrestrial legal jurisdiction. As for oceanic datacenters, they have a lot of technical disadvantages compared to orbital components. Large vessels would be preferable for stability, security, and navigational control, but power generation becomes impractical unless you permit commercial maritime nuclear reactors, which seems unlikely, or plan to have LNG refueling tankers visit every few weeks, which is expensive. A constellation of small solar powered vessels scales a lot less conveniently in the ocean, given communications constraints from the ground, security difficulties, and the scale of ordinary maritime maintenance that is necessary.
So, I think you are wrong - there are other advantages. In orbit, security is a non-issue, environmental degradation is minimal, solar power is abundant, communications are easier, and in general the floor cost per node is lower, meaning that scaling down incurs fewer penalties.
Space is also covered by various international treaties, and nations on Earth would be quick to update any such treaties to cover datacenters even more strictly if companies were using such datacenters to flaunt the law of countries. And at least in their current state, these treaties basically make satellite operators subject to the laws of their host nation.
Long distance oceanic LNG shipping is about 3 to 5 cents per KG. I imagine it would be cheaper when you're just shipping out to international waters from the coast. Starship's most optimistic projections for price per kg to low Earth orbit is a little under $100 per kg, but could end up closer to $1,000 per kg.
As opposed to the cost of sending people into space to fix the space datacenter? Most space DC proposals I've heard have actually proposed not having any human maintenance at all because of how expensive it would be, instead opting to add extra redundancy for essential components and just writing it off when a GPU or PSU fails.
Please, please, please show me your math for this. Even use the $100 per kg to LEO price if you want to make itas favorable to your argument as possible. I would be willing to bet you $100 donated to the charity of the winner's choice if you math shows it being cheaper than a container ship (or oil platform type structure) 370 KM off the coast (i.e. in international waters) of some LNG processing hub.
People didn't do some very basic pricing math with Solar Roadways and similar grifts. Solar Roadways would cost a metric ton more per km than just using asphalt, and a metric ton more that just sticking solar panels in a field or the desert or on a rooftop somewhere etc., while being a worse road surface and producing less power.
Space datacenters face similar economic disadvantages, and none of the proponents seem to be saying anything about the financial math here. I personally find the discussion of stuff like "How are you going to cool it?" irrelevant and a distraction, except inasmuch as they affect the cost. Cooling the datacenters is absolutely feasible, but it definitely complicates the engineering (and drastically increases the amount of material that has to be launched) far above and beyond what would be needed for a nomal terrestrial datacenter or some of the other exotic options I mentioned.
First, you have to determine what is a minimally-viable node in each context. SpaceX is proposing essentially a single-rack node with 120KW power at a mass of about 2 tons. Let's assume that the same Nvidia racks would be used in an oceanic platform, so we can disregard the silicon costs. Starlink satellites are constructed at scale at a cost of about $1M/ton, so a reasonable cost estimate for Starmind satellites is about about $2M per satellite. Add $200K in launch costs and we're about $2.5M/node up front, with ~0 ongoing costs.
If we assume that solar arrays are impractical for oceanic data processing, the minimum viable node would have to be some kind of hull with active station-keeping and enough fuel storage to fuel a diesel generator and station-keeping for extended periods between refueling (30 days?). It starts getting sketchy here, but working with requirements of about 25 tons fuel capacity, it seems like you're looking at a 30-40 meter DP1 vessel. I couldn't find costs for new construction, but listings for similar class vessels decades old are around $3M (e.g., https://maritimesales.com/DAB17.htm), so that seems like a reasonable conservative estimate. And this the up-front cost only. Assuming it's autonomous, it will still need monthly fuel deliveries, regular PMCS and overhauls on engines, gensets, and thrusters, other seaworthiness maintenance like painting, cleaning, and lubrication, and you can expect substantial wear and tear and damage from environmental forces. Fuel replenishment alone is going to be at least $30K/month. And this is all for a single Nvidia rack!
Now of course as you start scaling up, the economics shift, but my point was that one of the advantages of orbital deployment is the ability to scale node sizes down.
If you're scaling things down to a single rack, then for $2.5 million I'll gladly stick it in my basement (which has gig fiber internet, I'll upgrade to the 2.5 gig plan if they'd prefer for that kind of money) and handle all maintenance for them.
If the point of space datacenters is being able to do them at a very small scale, there are a million better and cheaper options that don't run into the same sort of political/NIMBY resistance that big datacenters have. There's plenty of vacant office buildings with good internet and electrical hookups that would be far cheaper and easier to maintain than chucking a rack into orbit.
The economics of this literally make no sense, there's no point in doing this stuff at a small scale because you lose all the benefits of economies of scale.
I'm skeptical you have 120 KW service to your house
True, I probably only get about 50. I'll take a mere $1 million to host a third of a rack instead, after all scaling these things down doesn't matter ;)
Would fit better under my basement stairs at that size anyway.
Also, I don't think your calculations for Starmind accounted for the solar panels, radiators, etc. which are far more than a normal Starlink satellite would need.
Assuming the minimum viable product can even scale that small, what you're describing is not a lot different than what cryptominers were doing at home for a while, and their activities were often extremely unpopular with their neighbors. I'm curious how you plan to dissipate 50 KW of heat from under your basement stairs without annoying your neighbors. Not to mention, the $7.5K/month power/fiber bill takes a pretty big bite out of that after a 5 year operation cycle. After 10 years, you're probably not breaking even.
Interesting concept though: assuming you want to add, say, 2GW of inference capacity, that would be something like 40,000 1/3-size racks. Could you spread that out around the country enough that the increased load could be absorbed by the already-present electrical grid and generation capacity? The national average looks to be around 500 GW, so this seems plausible. I suspect the challenge would be getting people to sign up for having the noise in their homes.
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