zlacker

>>mindra+(OP)
The one thing that space has going for itself is space. You could have way bigger datacenters than on Earth and just leave them there, assuming Starship makes it cheap enough to get them there. I think it would maybe make sense if 2 things: - We are sure we will need a lot of gpus for the next 30-40 years. - We can make the solar panels + cooling + GPUs have a great life expectancy, so that we can just leave them up there and accumulate them.

Latency wise it seems okay for llm training to put them higher than Starlink to make them last longer and avoid decelerating because of the atmosphere. And for inference, well, if the infra can be amortized over decades than it might make the inference price cheap enough to endure additional latencies.

Concerning communication, SpaceX I think already has inter-starlinks laser comms, at least a prototype.

>>awei+m7
There is lots and lots and lots of space on Earth where hardly anyone is living. Cheap rural areas can support extremely large datacenters, limited only by availability of utilities and workers.

>>Legion+O7
We also have to build a lot more solar and nuclear in addition of the datacenters themselves, which we need to do anyway but it would compound the land we use for energy production.

>>awei+i8
Yet a colossal number of servers on satellites would require the same energy-production facilities to be shipped into orbit (and to receive regular maintainence in orbit whenever they fail), which requires loads of land for launch facilities as well as processing for fuel and other consumable resources. Solar might be somewhat more efficient, but not nearly so much so as to make up for the added difficulty in cooling. One could maybe postulate asteroid mining and space manufacturing to reduce the total delta-V requirement per satellite-year, but missions to asteroids have fuel requirements of their own.

If anything, I'd expect large-scale Mars datacenters before large-scale space datacenters, if we can find viable resources there.