zlacker

There are already large communication satellites that consume several kW of power.

>>pantal+(OP)
Oh, good. So we only need to multiply that by 200 million times, per space datacenter.

>>FireBe+62
The data center would still consist of many individual satellites, much like a earth based data center consists of many individual servers

>>pantal+S2
A large telecommunications satellite operates at about 15kW. A Blackwell GPU consumes 1kW so you would be at 15 Blackwells per satellite. The cooling surface needs to scale linearly so there is little return to scale.

This doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

>>pantal+S2
tbh you could just combine them with starlink sats. didn't they just apply for (and get?) a license for 1 million sats? Stick a single racks worth of gpu power on those and hey presto you've just got yourself the largest ai cluster in the world by far.

>>esskay+zf
The problem is, they need so much more power than a Starlink satellite that they need to be placed in a sun-synchronous orbit. The orbits that Starlink satellites need to use are nothing like the orbits that would have to be used for this rejected attempt at an Ed Wood sci-fi tribute script.

And if you accept that the duty cycle of the AI+Starlink satellites will be less than 50%, it would be much better to build the data centers in random deserts and wastelands on Earth and use the Starlink network to talk to them.