The idea itself may be sound, though that's unrelated to the question of whether Elon Musk can be relied on to be honest with investors about what their real failure projections and cost estimates are and whether it actually makes financial sense to do this now or in the near future.
I can't get in detail about real numbers but it's not doable with current hardware by a large margin.
Because these platforms are experimental and rapidly evolving, they aren't 'space-ready.' Space-grade hardware must be 'rad-hardened' and proven over years of testing.
By the time an accelerator is reliable enough for orbit, it’s several generations obsolete, making it nearly impossible to compete or turn a profit against ground-based clusters.
For many on HN, Elon buying Twitter was a wake up call because he suddenly started talking about software and servers and data centers and reliability and a ton of people with experience with those things were like "oh... this guy's an idiot".
Data centers in space are exactly like this. Your comment (correctly) alludes to this.
Companies like Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft all have so many servers that parts are failing constantly. They fail so often on large scales that it's expected things like a hard drive will fail while a single job might be running.
So all of these companies build systems to detect failures, disable running on that node until it's fixed, alerting someone to what the problem is and then bringing the node back online once the problem it's addressed. Everything will fail. Hard drives, RAM, CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, power supplies, fans, NICs, cables, etc.
So all data centers will have a number of technicians who are constantly fixing problems. IIRC Google's ratio tended to be about 10,000 servers per technician. Good technicians could handle higher ratios. When a node goes offline it's not clear why. Techs would take known good parts and basically replacce all of them and then figure out what the problem is later, dispose of any bad parts and put tested good parts into the pool of known good parts for a later incident.
Data centers in space lose all of this ability. So if you have a large number of orbital servers, they're going to be failing constantly with no ability to fix them. You can really only deorbit them and replace them and that gets real expensive.
Electronics and chips on satellites also aren't consumer grade. They're not even enterprise grade. They're orders of magnitude more reliable than that because they have to deal with error correction terrestial components don't due to cosmic rays and the solar wind. That's why they're a fraction of the power of something you can buy from Amazon but they cost 1000x as much. Because they need to last years and not fail, something no home computer or data center server has to deal with.
Put it this way, a hardened satellite or probe CPU is like paying $1 million for a Raspberry Pi.
And anybody who has dealt with data centers knows this.
Beyond that, we don't actually know the failure rate of the Tesla fleet. I’ve never had a personal computer fail from use in my life, but that’s just anecdotal and holds no weight against the law of large numbers. When you operate at the scale of a massive cluster, "one-in-a-million" failures become a daily statistical certainty.
Claiming that because you don't personally see cars failing on the side of the road means they require zero intervention actually proves my original point: people who haven't managed data center reliability underestimate the sheer volume of "rare" failures that occur at scale.
I'm not a data center technician myself, but I have deep respect for those folks and the complexity they manage. It's quite surprising the market still buys Musk's claims day after day.
For what it's worth, this project plans to use Tesla AI5/AI6 hardware for the first launches.
The basic math is that launching a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, *with no ongoing operational or maintenance needs*.
The thing is, everyone knows Elon is not a real CEO of any of these companies. There isn’t enough time to even be the CEO of one company and a parent. This guy has 10 companies and 10 children. He’s just holding the position and preventing others from being in that position, so he can enact changes like this. And his boards are all stacked with family members, close friends, and sycophants who won’t oppose his agenda.
Compute power has increased more than 1000x while the cost came down.
I recall paying $3000 for my first IBM PC.
> they need to last years and not fail
Not if they are cheap enough to build and launch. Quantity has a quality all its own.
You are assuming things need to run the same way in space, for instance you mentioned fans, you won't have any in space. You also won't have any air, dust, static, or any moving parts.
You are assuming the costs to launch to orbit are high, when the entire point of Spacex's latest ship is to bring the cost to launch so low that it is cheaper per ton than an airplane flight.
Maintenance would be nice but you are saying this like Elon Musk's company doesn't already manage the most powerful datacenters on the planet.
You have no clue what you are talking about regarding cosmic rays and solar wind, these will literally be solar powered and behind panels and shielding 100% of the time.
I bet much less than half of the hundreds of HN commenters here bother to read it. Many are clearly unfamiliar with its content.
Why do you feel this kneejerk reaction to defend Elon and his companies? You'll never be him. He doesn't care about you. He'd use you for reactor shielding for an uptick in Tesla share price without a second's hesitation. This is cultish behavior.
Do you have any idea who you're defending? I'll give you just one example. A right-wing influencer named Dom Lucre uploaded CSAM to Twitter, a video. But he didn't just upload it. He watermarked it first so had it on his computer and then postporcessed it. It was I believe up for days. This was apparently a video so bad that mere possession should land you in prison. And the fact that the FBI didn't arrest him basically tells you he'd an FBI asset. After taking days to ban him, Elon personally intervened to unban him. Why? Because reasons.
And this is the same man who it's becoming clear was deeply linked with Jeffrey Epstein, as was his brother [1].
Bringing this back to the original point: this is why Twitter lost 80% of its value after Elon acquired it. Advertisers fled because it became a shithole for CSAM and Nazis.
As for "basically no downtime" that's hilarious. I even found you commenting the classic anecdote "it was fine for me" (paraphrased) on one such incident when Twitter DDOSed itself [2].
Your cultish devotion here is pretty obvious eg [3]. I'm genuinely asking: what do you get out of all this?
[1]: https://www.axios.com/local/boulder/2026/02/02/kimbal-musk-j...
[2]: >>36555897
[3]: >>42836560
Still, dropping a pod into the sea makes more sense than launching it into space. At least cooling, power, connectivity and eventual maintenance is simpler.
The whole thing makes no sense and is seems like it's just Musk doing financial manipulation again.
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...
It's a fig leaf for getting two IPOs in one. There's no sense in analyzing it any further.
I think there's a very interesting use case on edge computing (edge of space, if you wanna make the joke) that in fact some satellites are already doing, were they preprocess data before sending back to Earth. But datacenter-power-level computing is not even near.
I have no idea and numbers to back it up, but I feel it would be even easier to set up a Moon datacenter than an orbital datacenter (when talking about that size of datacenter)
Space has solar energy going for itself. With underwater you don't need to lug a 1420 ton rocket with a datacenter payload to space.
But yeah, otherwise agree that his conduct, within a corporate context and otherwise, do not merit the kind of public adulation he's getting.
I also remember (vividly at that) his comments on distributed systems when he bought twitter back in the day and was starting to take it over. I remember thinking to myself, if he's just spewing so much bullshit on this, and I can understand this because it's closer to my body of knowledge, what other such stuff is he pronouncing authoritatively on other domains I don't know so much about?
I'm sorry, but what? Not only has it had multiple half days of downtime, two full days+, but just two weeks ago had significant downtime.
https://www.thebiglead.com/is-x-down-twitter-suffers-major-o...
More disturbing than surprising.
He's basically trading two cypto coins with himself and sending out a press release.
Exactly the opposite of space, where all cooling must happen through radiation, which is expensive/inefficient
But seriously, why are all the stans in these comments as unknowledgeable as Elon himself? Is that just what is required to stan for this type of garbage?
Keep in mind that the current state of space electronics is centered around one-off very expensive launches, where the electronics failure would be a fiscal disaster. (See JWST)
Being able to rapidly launch cheap electronics may very well change the whole outlook on this.
Also AI GPUs are the exact opposite of cheap electronics
They highlight the exact reliability constraint I was thinking of: that replacing failed TPUs is trivial on Earth but impossible in space. Their solution is redundant provisioning, which moves the problem from "operationally impossible" to "extremely expensive."
You would effectively need custom, super-redundant motherboards designed to bypass dead chips rather than replace them. The paper also tackles the interconnect problem using specialized optics to sustain high bitrates, which is fascinating but seems incredibly difficult to pull off given that the constellation topology changes constantly. It might be possible, but the resulting hardware would look nothing like a regular datacenter.
Also this would require lots of satelites to rival a regular DC which is also very hard to justify. Let's see what the promised 2027 tests will reveal.
Keep in mind this is in response to "basically no downtime"
If you told me Microsoft had "basically no downtime" I'd have the same reaction.