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
You can't just "leave them there" though. They orbit at high speed, which effectively means they actually take up vastly more space, with other objects orbiting at high speed intersecting those orbits. The orbits that are most useful are relatively narrow bands shared with a lot of other satellites and a fair amount of debris, and orbits tend to decay over time (which is a problem if you're in low earth orbit because they'll decay all the way into the atmosphere, and a problem if you're in geostationary orbit because you'll lose the advantage of stationary bit for maintaining comms links). This is a solvable problem with propulsion, but that entails bringing the propellant with you and end-of-life (or an expensive refuelling operation) when it runs out. The cost of maintaining real estate space is vastly more than out right owning land.

Similarly, making stuff have a great life expectancy is much more expensive than having it optimized for cost and operational requirements instead but stored somewhere you can replace individual components as and when they fail, and it's also much easier to maximise life expectancy somewhere bombarded by considerably less radiation.