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Re:xAI joins SpaceX by queenkjuul on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @12:39AM (#46866946)
Have you heard of cosmic radiation?
Re:xAI joins SpaceX by WalterBright on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @02:45AM (#46867826)
Cosmic rays take time to destroy them.
Re:xAI joins SpaceX by tecleandor on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @06:44AM (#46869748)
It's not only about destruction. It's also about reliability. Without proper shielding and error correction you're going to have lots and lots of reliability issues and data corruption. And if we're talking about AI and given the current reliability problems of the Nvidia hardware, plus the radiation, plus the difficulty for refrigerating all that stuff on space... That's a big problem. And we still haven't started to talk about the energy generation.

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)

Re:xAI joins SpaceX by WalterBright on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @01:46PM (#46875350)
We'll see!

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.

Re:xAI joins SpaceX by queenkjuul on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @02:58PM (#46876391)
People already do that (launch cheap, redundant, unshielded electronics) for LEO, but sounds like these data centers would pretty explicitly not be in LEO.

Also AI GPUs are the exact opposite of cheap electronics