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[return to "Data centers in space makes no sense"]
1. virtua+Ju4[view] [source] 2026-02-04 23:24:22
>>ajyoon+(OP)
The author seems to have confused a few things.

* They assume 1 satalite = 1 GPU. This is quite funny, actually. A single H200 floating in space with a solar panel and an antenna. In reality, a satellite would pack as many chips as the heat/power allows. A Starlink-sized satellite should be able to hold 40 or so chips. There's no reason why a larger satellitte couldn't hold, say, 1024. * They mention training, but sampling is what makes sense here. Training is a different beast, and requires high reliability, high bandwidth, low latency, and a lot of IO. Space would not be ideal for this. I'd expect training to remain terrestrial and just do sampling in space. (FWIW, sampling will be most of the compute allocation). * Also, no one upgrades GPUs in datacenters, they just add new nodes and leave the old ones there. Google still has their P100 nodes running. Not being able to fix them, though, is a significant concern.

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2. ajyoon+0w4[view] [source] 2026-02-04 23:32:44
>>virtua+Ju4
Fair - my "millions" note is wrt SpaceX filing with the FCC to launch 1 million satellites, and the Google viability study deals with large constellations rather than monolithic stations. Public communications from companies purporting to go into orbital data centers have made every appearance that they think virtually all compute can go to space.
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