Is it dumb and impractical when NIMBY and folks unaligned with your political agenda want to prevent any and all terrestrial datacenter development?

Yes, it is still easier to find somewhere else on earth.

What’s wrong with not wanting a datacenter in your backyard?

Do you even own a black leather jacket and have a hair transplant? Like you need to live on the edge to understand.

I don't think you need to be old to understand that when you choose a place to hopefully live out the rest of your life, you'd like it to not change much or at least change in a predictable manner. Nobody wants an overnight gut punch to their quality of life. Certainly if someone asks your opinion in the form of a vote, you're not going to vote for ruining what you have.

FWIW, given how many places in the U.S. are passing datacenter bans, I'd expect space-based datacenters to make a lot more sense over the coming years just because it'll be illegal to build them anywhere else.

I don't support data center bans but even if that happens in the US I'm pretty sure some other countries will welcome them. For AI inference workloads the network latency doesn't matter.

I don't think the entire nation would ban data centers. The problem is that tech companies are building them on cheap land. Which usually means land that has little water and is better used for food or oxygen or things other than a massive one-story building.

Data centers in brownfields and urban environments see near-zero resistance. There are data centers in skyscrapers in the center of most major U.S. cities, and nobody cares.

Stop plowing down the forests, slurping up the aquifers, and digging up the prairies, and people will stop complaining.

Data centers in urban areas definitely see massive resistance. Seattle straight up banned any new data centers with a capacity over 20 MW, even though water is a non-issue, and we have tons of industrial land in the south of the city.

The problem is data centers produce absolutely colossal amounts of noise that can be heard and felt for miles. Even if water is a non-issue, the noise isn’t.

Neither is a problem in the sense that both noise and water consumption can be mitigated with some minor (relative to the total cost of a project) capital investments. If these were rational objections, states and municipalities could simply issue noise codes and water access caps, then let the companies figure out how to work within the lines. Instead, we’re left with blanket bans

This is actually a meme/fake videos on the internet, where they add random noise over their videos while recording a datacenter to make it seem really loud.

Realistically you can only hear it if you're within 30-50 feet of the data center.

No, it’s not the noise it’s the power consumption. Your locale becomes a power consumption hog so your off-peak hours and your peak hours become very similarly priced. Noise can be dampened, the power bill cannot.

95% of Seattle isn't "urban."

Put a data center next to BoAT, and nobody cares.

Presumably because people don't want the cost of their energy to go up because a single company wants to come in and use half of the total capacity.

People are complaining because they are building data centers near people, and data centers produce prodigious amounts of noise pollution. They should be building them far away from civilization, where the low frequency noise has plenty of distance to attenuate.

People are complaining because of propaganda online. My middle school age children think data centers are evil and we don't have any around us nor have they ever seen one.

Have you ever been near an actual data center? Have you ever been in one?

Have you ever actually lived next to one?

Not visited one in the middle of the day. Lived next to one 24/7.

But thats a dumb reason for space data centers to be good ideas.

The world is a very, very large place and I have a hard time imagining space would be an easier place to do anything. Nobody wants to live near petrochemical factories or aluminum smelters, either, but we’ve got lots of petrochemicals and aluminum. SV execs shredded any chance of cheap public cooperation by presenting like cartoonishly evil, patronizing, greedy big corporate bad guys from some shitty legal dramedy. They need to learn from their mistakes, develop some humility, and approach people with a serious financial proposition, like the oil industry in Alaska. That will absolutely be a lot cheaper than space.

> SV execs shredded any chance of cheap public cooperation by presenting like cartoonishly evil, patronizing, greedy big corporate bad guys from some shitty legal dramedy.

Did they though? From what I’ve read the places where they build get lots of money and infrastructure (not only DC-related) from them.

Lots of places don’t. Some spin yarns describing job creation and huge economic opportunities, which are largely bullshit, in exchange for large tax exemptions. In Alaska, the people get money, directly, not just some institutions.

The cartoon evil part is less about the data centres and how they speak of AI.

Whether it’s A16Z tweeting about how the value of all white collar wages is their market or Anthropic basically saying entry level jobs are done.

It’s also very much about GPU-focused data centers. They’ve been installing essentially illegal (with shaky loopholes) gas-powered turbines on site with no emissions control to speak of, in populated areas. They’ve made local governments sign NDAs, under false promises of huge economic development and job creation, preventing them from telling residents that the big real estate project in the Eries was a data center. Cartoonish.

Oh, they do that too, but it's cartoonishly evil to go in and ask for property tax abatements and for the local ratepayers to support your infrastructure when you have valuations in the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.

It's hard for the citizens who live nearby to learn about all of that when the idiotic SV execs forced their civic leadership to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements. Somehow, they just recently learned that was a bad idea.

https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-says-it-is-going-to-stop-...

https://www.wpr.org/news/microsoft-to-stop-using-ndas-with-l...

https://www.npr.org/2026/08/27/nx-s1-5879528/data-center-nda...

Psychotic? Likely. Arrogant? Unquestionably. Maniacal? Utterly. Cunning? Indeed. Delusional? Arguably. But I wouldn’t call them idiotic, per se.

If they're so smart, why didn't they see this data center backlash coming and plan for it accordingly?

I mostly agree with you, and obviously there is a lot of intelligence in the valley, but there doesn't seem to be much wisdom.

I think they couldn’t see it because they’re steeped in the cult of AI, and far too arrogant, maniacal, et al to read the room. I don’t think you have to be dumb to fail to acknowledge reality.

I agree there is a profound lack of wisdom in tech, and they seem to be proud of it… like they believe they’ve discovered a workaround.

Well, I for one think self-awareness is a much higher order of intelligence than clever manipulation of symbols or the external world, so I still find it stupid. Finding a workaround for the inability to have ironic self-distance is kind of the most pointless, dumbest activity I can even think of.

> I agree there is a profound lack of wisdom in tech, and they seem to be proud of it… like they believe they’ve discovered a workaround.

Even in discussions here I'm constantly put off by comments that are this hand-rubbing talking to oneself about how the "AI haters" are all stupid, or how they can be forced to use or consume things they don't want against their will. It kind of baits all the sociopaths out into the open, because if their deus ex machina is about to show up, why bother with the tedious masking?

> I don’t think you have to be dumb to fail to acknowledge reality.

No, but you can be emotionally stunted to force you to be dumb. Call it narcissism or whatever, but no sense of others or self = constant need to rewrite the world around you, and fearing logic and honesty like a vampire would fear sunlight. A dumb person can learn, people who are forced to act dumb cannot. They are still, effectively, very dumb. They will go to their graves dumber than an illiterate or mentally handicapped person. Not knowing a bunch of things that are true is meh... but thinking you know a trillion things that are all just the scab on a wound that happened in childhood, none of them true, and one dumber than the other, now that is astonishingly dumb.

I think we’re pretty firmly in semantic territory here.

They did see it coming. Thus all the secrecy, and why datacenters in space have seen so much attention the past few years.

Maybe they didn't predict the magnitude and vitriol of the backlash, but NIMBY resistance to all infrastructure projects has only been growing over the years. For example, wrt solar and wind power. It was obvious data centers were going to see at least as much resistance because you need to build the data centers and more power generation.

Do data centers in space make less sense than build outs in more accommodating countries? Not necessarily. It's not an either/or thing, and it all depends on the concrete bottom line numbers. In space you don't have to worry about managing political winds at all; you control everything. More accomodating countries tend to be poorer with worse infrastructure, so there are more unknown risks. And you don't need to develop or manage a foreign workforce, which is why 100% of Silicon Valley jobs didn't instantly jump to India or Poland.

I don't understand how data centres in space make any sense at all given the heat constraints. Has there been some plausible breakthrough in heat dissipation technology recently?

No, but every day, armchair business analysts and people high on AI optimism expand the infinite frontier of blind faith and unfounded optimism in the future value of LLM infrastructure.

Radiative cooling isn't as big of an impediment as people think. It's part of the reason why a desert that's 120F+ during the day gets so cold so fast unless there's cloud cover to radiate back.[1] IIUC correctly, the theoretical maximum is over 400 watts per square meter, and existing tech can achieve 80-90+% of that. It's an engineering challenge, but no more than creating reusable rockets. The real challenge is building a reliable convective system from the heat source to the radiating mechanism, and just the general problems of building a compact package for delivery that then unpacks and orients itself once in orbit. No new science is required, and you can pencil things out today the same way Musk did when penciling out the economics of building a reusable rocket.

[1] Convection effects are also involved, but that cuts both ways as the air is also radiating back at you. A significant fraction of the net cooling is pure radiative.

> In space you don't have to worry about managing political winds at all; you control everything.

You ignore global geopolitics at your own peril. In space you have no government to protect you when a hostile nation state blows up your infrastructure.

> If they're so smart, why didn't they see this data center backlash coming and plan for it accordingly?

Because the backlash isn't actually about the data centers, it's about AI. 80% of the complaints about data centers are uninformed nonsense and the remaining 20% only apply to the ones where they're doing something that isn't actually required, like burning fossil fuels to power them. Which you can tell because the demands look like "stop building data centers" rather than "to build one you have to add 110% as many watt hours in new non-fossil fuel generation to the grid as you use".

Funnily enough, the last comment I made before this chain was saying literally exactly this. I completely agree.

Sufficiently advanced arrogance is indistinguishable from stupidity

The majority of data center bans on the ballot passed. I undertsand theres a little schadenfruede in calling them idiotic, but the outcome doesnt realy scream competence. These execs arent beating the allegations if not being able to pass a ninth grade civics class

https://www.govtech.com/question-of-the-day/how-many-anti-da...

It depends on the company building the data center and the competence of the government approving the plan. https://www.governing.com/infrastructure/rural-louisiana-roa...

Oh yes, there is lots of money going to the places near me getting DCs. Specifically to the politicians who conveniently happen to own the land the DCs are built on or construction companies that are building them.

Someone ought to tell the voters who supported all the anti data center propositions and politicians that they're wrong and just imagining it not being handled well.

In seriousness this is an example of the previous point. Rather than engaging with the issue the tech/DC industry seems to think they can wordplay their way out of it by quibbling about irrelevant technical details and people are primed to get extremely angry at grinfucking type behaviour nowadays.

Yes, voters are very frequently wrong and support lots of policies that end up hurting everyone, such as rent controls.

What a bizarre non-sequitir to a vague topic. Are you incapable of following a topic or just being disingenuous when confronted with trying to argue that single humans and top down edicts are infallible?

The oil industry in Alaska that never pays what it should as oil prices are at all time highs?

Yeah. Nowhere did I say they were actually good, but they understand that money talks and bullshit walks when they’re trying to do something unpopular. Assuming ham fisted subterfuge and bullying is sufficient is a symptom of the ludicrous amounts of hubris in this industry’s leadership.

The possibilities are:

- America. Much harder since the elections. Not appealing.

- Europe. Doesn't have enough electricity with anti-AI, anti-big tech and high tax governments. Not appealing.

- Latin America. Expensive, likely to have your assets appropriated by socialists. Not appealing.

- Africa. No.

- Middle East. Your GPU cluster might get blown up. No.

- China. To some extent yes. Plenty of power and space, pro-AI government, but many companies don't want to send their IP to a country famous for copying it and they're still under GPU sanctions.

- Japan, Korea, etc. Maybe. They're not really famous for big datacenters though.

- Australia, Canada. Possible, but you're exposed to Europe-style political risks.

There just aren't many places on Earth where it's realistic to build and operate AI datacenters once political issues and grid constraints are taken into account.

We're currently building 500+ datacenters in the EU?

Yeah? By "datacenter" are we talking about the kind of gigawatt scale facilities they're casually tossing around in the USA? I haven't heard of any such projects that actually got off the ground. Stargate UK was paused.

Come on… this is exponentially too reductive to be a serious counterpoint.

> - Latin America. Expensive, likely to have your assets appropriated by socialists. Not appealing.

I had to laugh. Not sure what Kool Aid you’ve been drinking, but you should stop.

Latin American countries have a long history of appropriating expensive industrial assets, what do you think is so crazy about this?

I laughed at the “likely”. How many times have foreign industrial assets been seized? Just in the past few years there has been huge foreign investments in Brazil (which is the one I follow more closely) covering assets that depreciate much slower than an AI datacenter. And all that under a government opponents call “communist”.

It’s far more likely the American companies will appropriate the government, as it has happened much too frequently, especially in Latin America.

Quite a lot of times? Brazil has an active programme of seizing land even today.

https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2026/01/30/brazil-advances-a...

They also love pressuring tech companies over content, something much easier if they have expensive assets in the country.

There are still court cases pending over Venezuela's expropriation of assets.

https://tlblog.org/d-c-circuit-allows-venezuela-expropriatio...

Argentina was seizing multi-billion dollar oil firms as recently as fifteen years ago.

You're going to say, but those aren't datacenters. No, because nobody builds big datacenters in Latin America, because they have a history of nationalizing valuable assets.

Do not confuse agrarian reform with state appropriation of farmland. Agrarian reform aims at unproductive land and sustainable farming development.

Tech companies operating in a country have to comply with said country’s laws. In the specific case of Brazil, compliance with judicial orders is not optional. I remember Twitter was blocked because Elon tried to be non-compliant by firing everyone and thus having no representative in Brazil. It obviously didn’t work. The US forced similar adjustment on TikTok and doesn’t seem to hesitate trying to impose American laws outside its territory.

Most countries consider mineral resources to be state-owned if they are located within their national borders. Bribing officials and installing puppet governments only takes you so far, and occasionally local governments grow backbones to allow them to oppose exploitation.

It’s still cheaper to build in a completely undeveloped desert with no neighbors and costly utility hookups than space. By orders of magnitude. That gap will never be materially close.

Space datacenters are just SDI2, a convenient bullshit to be able to funnel more money to campaign donors.

As long as there’s space on earth, Space Datacenters can never be economical. It’s rally that simple.

If Starship launches end up in the $20 million range they would be easily economical. Running cable isn't free.

How do you cool a datacenter in a vacuum? You’d need ridiculous radiators to dump megawatts. How do you service it in space when something breaks?

An individual satellite would not be consuming megawatts.

The radiators are not a big deal. The solar panels required are much bigger. You can just run the electronics really hot to improve the efficiency of the radiation. Nobody is going to get close to those chips so the usual safety requirements don't apply.

You don't service it. Over time the chips degrade and become less useful. Eventually you deorbit it and it burns up. It's a sealed unit, not meant to be replaced.

> You can just run the electronics really hot to improve the efficiency of the radiation. Nobody is going to get close to those chips so the usual safety requirements don't apply.

The chip temperature isn’t limited by safety issues (unless self destruction of the chip counts as safety to you). Certainly not to protect the people around it.

Can you share the math of why the panels need to be larger than the radiators?

And how many of these rockets would you have to launch to match the capacity of a mid-size terrestrial data center?

We’re not talking about launching little satellites here, we’re talking about replacing giant buildings.

You think people wouldn't object to building a datacenter in undeveloped (or pristine as it would be called) desert? I honestly think they'll object to building them in space.

I don't really understand this perspective. The margins for data centers are such that they could pay massive subsidies to state and local governments and put them in the middle of nowhere with BTM power, and almost all that opposition would evaporate overnight. And you'd still come out way ahead of space-based DCs. They're not doing this yet because they don't have to.

Maybe they could if they weren't trying to get those governments to compete against each other with tax breaks.

Agreed, but giving up tax breaks and instead paying extra taxes or whatever to the localities who will accept DCs will still be cheaper than space DCs, at least for awhile.

Nah, they'll just bite the bullet and build the data centers in remote Canada or Finland or somewhere else no one's complaining (ignore Greta as per usual) and tap into the local hydropower resources. Might take a tad longer and cost slightly more money than in [quasi-lawless US state], but other than that, no problem. Aluminium smelters (basically a solid form of electricity export) in Quebec and Siberia have been doing that for decades already (like 20GW private-ish hydropower).

Wish they'd find a good spot in no man's land and do geothermal.

Finland only has limited hydro capacity that is needed for load-following due to the prevalence of wind power. It makes no sense to waste it for baseload generation. Additionally, the last major hydro power plant was built in 1976. All subsequent attempts have been massively controversial.

A recent law also gave data centers the last priority for grid access. The idea was to prioritize productive industry over less productive uses of electricity. Even something with as little added value as steel production tends to employ ~10 people (directly or as subcontractors) and produce ~€10 million/year of exports for every MW of average power consumption.

You could probably see some of those bans reversed. You just need to have companies go into communities and act like they're a multi-trillion-dollar company instead of begging for tax abatements and shoving off the cost of the infrastructure on the people who feel like they might lose their jobs from AI.

If cities are banning datacenters, we can

a. put them a few miles outside major urban centers

b. put them in space

Which is a cheaper, better option?

they are not gonna law itself back to stone age by making data centers illegal, it's just too much money, security implications to chain yourself up just because a few politicians wants a few votes and "enviromentalists" demands it. Don't forget there are people that are ok with data centers.

I think the data centers would get a lot less push back if they were built using new solar and/or wind power in places that have abundant water, and maybe further away from residential areas. Yes that is more expensive than what they are doing now, but it is still almost certainly cheaper than building in space. Heck, putting data centers in the ocean is probably cheaper than space.

> FWIW, given how many places in the U.S. are passing datacenter bans

If you have the technical chops to set up a data center in space — with no connections to the electrical grid or municipal water, you can use your technology to build your data center with the same specs right here on earth in 90% of places that you think are issuing "bans"

It's not a technical problem. It's a people problem. Every data center project over the last year has experienced some form of pushback no matter where they're built

By definition, a data center in space is remote, is self-reliant on electrical power and doesn't use potable water. These characteristics require technical solution to be practical, and if one has cracked that, they have disarmed all the push-back arguments people have raised against data centers. It's telling that the data centers want to build-out near population centers, i.e. where someone else has paid for fiber, grid and water infrastructure; it's a good old fashioned raid of the commons

This is first order thinking, of course buildings are built near builders…

building where people live is raiding the commons? Lol

Likely because the AI companies that are going to use those data centers have the absolute worst marketing imaginable. "We're going to take away your job and might accidently kill everybody on earth!" It's no wonder they get pushback.

If all the energy for a space appliance comes from the sun, in steady state they only have to radiate away the same amount that hits them. All long-lived spacecraft manage it.

Whether they can be worth the money it cost to put them in orbit is another story.

> All long-lived spacecraft manage it.

Apples to oranges, long-luver satellites have modest power needs. Doing a back-of-the napkin math on required size of solar array and radiative elements for a single-rack's worth of energy is a sobering exercise for those who are a overly exuberant on the topic. The all-in power estimate for a single GB300 chip is 2.1kW

Well, it can’t use more than it can get from the sun that hits it. So it can’t need to radiate more than that away. So it’s radiator size needs are in proportion to its solar panel size needs, and no worse than that.

> Well, it can’t use more than it can get from the sun that hits it. So it can’t need to radiate more than that away

You are correct that the first law of thermodynamics dictates the energy, but anyone who has parked a car in the sun will tell you, the temperature where the absorption/radiation equilibrium is achieved is often ill-suited for normal operation.

The average temperature of a rock or the ISS in earth orbit is about -18C.

It's this huge misconception that space is super cold. A better mind model is that space doesn't have much of a temperature at all just cause there's nothing there. Vacuum doesn't have a temperature.

You won't immediately freeze if you enter space without a suit. You'll die almost immediately, but it will be because your blood will begin to boil because of the lack of pressure kinda like an extreme form of divers sickness - it's just not the cold that'll get you first.

That’s all true. But stuff in space has a temperature, and once I’d been dead a while in LEO, mine would be -18C.

> mine would be -18C

FYI; that's not how it works, you and the rock you mentioned in a different comment cannot have the same temperature of -18C. This is due to differences in material, and geometry to a lesser extent.

Even if you were rock-shaped, the rates of energy absorption and radiation is what determines your remains' temperature, this ratio differs for different materials, and thus difference fiilnal temperatures.

Sure it varies a bit. ISS average skin temp is 10C, for example. A difference that doesn’t matter.

Why keep pushing back on this point? The total available energy from the sun in LEO averages about 1.36KW/m^2, and more than this can be radiated away by current deployed technology.

Solar powered space data centers probably make no economic sense. But not because we can’t cool them. We wouldn’t be able to run them very hot because there isn’t enough power there to do so.

> Sure it varies a bit

No, not just a bit. It varies by hundreds of degrees depending on the materials α/ε ratio.

Your mental model is off: materials that good absorbers but poor emitters will get very hot, and the flip-side stay cool, and are used to make the cooling elements in the ISS . The temperature of ball of black nickel at 1 AU will settle at balmy 239C - not -18C. Polished Aluminum -> roughly 145C.

I’ve made a note not to make my space data center a black nickel sphere, and instead to make it like we generally make satellites.

My nickel guy is gonna be so disappointed.

Again, just to remind you, I didn’t claim space datacenters are economically rational.

My original claim, in its entirety, was "You'll also get much better cooling for free via convection."

You sure will. My contribution is that you don’t need much better cooling.

Well yes, but what matters is how hot that rock gets. Some rocks melt or vaporise in space (see comets).

An object in low earth orbit has an average temperature of -18C.

That’s right, and it’s not very hot: -18C on average.

The Earth and moon have rock crusts and don’t melt.

There is the additional problem that the GPUs are not in the panels, so to radiate the heat you must first transport it from the GPUs, then distribute it uniformly over the entire surface of the radiators, otherwise some parts will overheat.

Without gravity, it is likely that this can be done only by pumping continuously a lot of liquid, which will increase the power consumption and it will reduce reliability.

Not really. In sun synchronous orbit you can use solar power without battery backup. You can't do that on Earth because of night time.

Remote towns with populations of 43 are exactly the sorts of places that are pushing back on having datacenters in their areas.

And space is the ultimate physical protection. In reality a bigger issue than GPU thefts are protests or leftist groups trying to firebomb you. See the problems the Tesla factory in Germany has had with leftist violence, like setting its electricity pylons on fire (because electric cars "consume natural resources and are not sustainable", lol). The left has become very anti-AI and so the risk of attacks on facilities, especially if built outside the USA, is quite high which in turn means you have to overbuild physical security like high fences.

The number of slots in the sun synchronous orbits is limited. More slots can be accommodated if the satellites can maneuver to avoid collisions.

Moreover, a datacenter in a sun synchronous orbit must be able to maneuver anyway, otherwise without adjusting the orbit it will enter in the shadow of the Earth after a month or two, due to the revolution of the Earth around the Sun.

If the datacenter must make periodic adjustments of the orbit, it will need to carry a lot of fuel, especially because a datacenter will be much heavier than a typical satellite, so much more fuel will be needed for orbit changes.

Thus it is not certain that a sun synchronous orbit is the best choice. It is possible that the extra fuel required for it may make this choice worse than using another orbit where the datacenter will not have power for half of the time.

That's an interesting choice. All the discussion I saw before assumed sun-synchronous, you're the first to suggest otherwise.

Do you know what the capacity of this orbit is?

Antipathy towards AI isn't just on the left, you know. At least in the US it seems widespread, and the remote towns with population 43 are far more likely to have right wing inhabitants than left wing.

> A remote town with a population of 43 will be happy for a data center to employ 2 locals, but data center operators aren't doing that today

This isn’t true, many of these DCs are in very very rural areas and get pushback from people not even living there. Governors get pressure from people hundreds of miles away of the site and then shut it down or impose moratoriums. It’s FUD on social media trying to slow AI advancement that is the root of all of it. The genie is out of the bottle, it’s like blacksmiths trying to slow industrialization. It’s already happened.

Feels like it would be cheaper and easier to put a data center on a platform/ship in international water than in space.

Also pretty sure there will always be empty land somewhere on earth where no one cares. It will always be easier to build and maintain even in a desert than in space.

People are radically overestimating the cost of space post-Starship. The sea is a terrible place to put inferencing chips!

1. Everything rusts.

2. There is no permanent power source, unlike in sun synchronous orbit where you have 24/7 daylight.

3. The US has no ship building industry of any size.

4. Storms can destroy things.

There is no empty space on Earth unclaimed by governments. Given the results of the American midterms essentially all land is currently controlled by left wing governments, and the left is very anti-AI. Only China really wants to build AI at scale but they don't have enough chips yet. That might change, but even then not many companies want to upload all their IP to China.

So you can forget building more or less any large industrial projects on Earth for the foreseeable future. It may not matter. There appears to be a GPU glut starting anyway, so who knows if anyone will even need new datacenters for a while?

There's an interesting company, Panthalassa [1], thats working on harnessing open ocean wave energy to generate electicity, and run inference with it. [2]

[1] https://panthalassa.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4PCJRN7yGs (interview with the founder)

> People are radically overestimating the cost of space post-Starship

Just going off what the folks working on it say.

> Speaking at The Information's recent WTF Summit in Napa Valley, Amanda Peterson Corio, Google's global head of data center energy, said data centers in space could cost up to 100 times as much as those built on the ground.

> Her advice to the rest of the industry was simple and (pun intended) grounded: "Let's explore all the terrestrial options before we go extraterrestrial."

https://www.techradar.com/pro/just-a-moonshot-google-energy-...

This is a ridiculous take. The reason that "people" are floating the idea of placing datacenter in space - despite the MASSIVE downsides present (cooling, maintenence, latency, availability, cost, etc.) is because you can't firebomb a datacenter thats in space as easily as you can one thats in your suburb. The regulatory friction behind a datacenter buildout is a low concern, and something that is "affordable" for hyperscalers and billionaires. Buying someones farm and building a private powerplant is small potatoes. But being terrestrial, angry people can show up and destroy it if they feel so inclined. It's much, much harder for angry plebs to launch something into orbit and then hit a moving target.

Just notice that your random $enemy_country can indeed destroy a datacenter in space much more easily than they can destroy one in suburb of one of your cities.

That tells a lot about who decision makers are optimizing against.

It makes sense on paper.

Power and heat radiation are the solved problems at scale in LEO. 50+% of solar energy is attenuated by the atmosphere, so panels can be huge and thin and flimsy in zero-G and get twice as much power as on the ground. Space-Based solar power plants are being actively explored by the US, UK, Chna, and Japan. The real hitch is how to send the power to the ground via microwave without also needing a receiver 20+ km across that lightly crisps birds flying above it.

If the thing that needs the power is in orbit already, all you're doing is sending data, something Starlink already has figured out.

The impractical part is shielding, maintenance, and a modular design that can be remotely maintained from the ground. When you're already running a high-cadence launch schedule, those costs and issues narrow, and you can swap out a component within days.

Again, it makes sense on paper. It might not be more practical than a data center on the ground, but there would be trade-offs.

Any out there methods to send energy down besides rf? Chucking battery down? Dangling catenary wire to a high altitude battery plane?

Realistically, running a cable to Earth via a space elevator would be possible, but the elevator would necessarily be at the equator, so only able to generate power half the time.

If you had the space elevator with a receiver for highly focused, high energy rf that wouldn't work with an atmosphere, you could then put the solar array in a higher orbit with 99.9% sun exposure.

Oh! here's an idea! Electric airplanes that pull power from a dangling induction charger!

One thing that I haven’t seen represented as a risk in space based datacenters is the satellite reentry debris pollution. We are essentially allowing a constant rain of heavy metals, silicon, arsenic, and other nasty things if this idea goes to scale.

Even if all the technical issues can be worked out, which I doubt, the incentives are there to pump as many as possible up there. I don’t think we want to live with that raining down on us all.

How does that compare to the quantity of natural material already entering the atmosphere?

The attenuation is less than 50% at the wavelengths used by solar panels.

What’s the practical solution to heat radiation that doesn’t require running your chips at infeasible temperatures?

Heat radiation is not solved at all due to (almost) lack of atmosphere. Look at ISS, enormous panels to radiate the heat away for an energy budget of only 170kW.

Low Earth Orbit isn't suitable for unpressurized/exposed semiconductor manufacturing for two main reasons: 1) it's not a true vacuum 2) worse, the atmosphere at that altitude is mostly atomic oxygen (O), that is extremely reactive and oxidizes everything https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Msis_atmospheric_com...

On Earth we have gone from optimizing for single core speed, to optimizing multi-core speed, to optimizing for lower power (for mobile), and then performance/energy (data centers).

One dimension left to optimize for, that space is going to incentivize, is highest possible stable operating temperature. Because all things being equal, you shed heat energy much faster at higher temperatures.

A bit counter intuitive, but increasing the clock speed both increases both operation and heat shedding rates (as long as the processor can remains reliable).

> Higher temperature operation sheds heat energy via radiation much faster.

Isn't this what heat pumps are for? Then you can run the radiators at higher temperatures without needing to run the electronics at those temperatures.

Heat pumps gain efficiency if the temperature gradient they have to maintain decreases.

This is a kind of nasty tradeoff in space. You can dissipate entropy per unit time from the same radiating area if you use a heat pump, but the heat pump itself uses power even if it’s perfect and operates at the Carnot limit, so you need a larger solar array.

There’s probably an optimum that involves a heat pump, but I don’t think it’s vastly better than not using a heat pump, and it’s certainly heavier and more complex.

Given the current state of the lift industry and price per kilo, it is economically unfeasible to manufacture or mine anything in space if it needs to be transported down or up the gravity well of any planet. Not even chips.

economicaly unfeasable for you perhaps, but what Elon is offering is a chance to be in the first wave of routine commercial access to microgravity, 1000kg mass and durration of your choice, and if you can achive the materials science objective to make something, that wasn't, possible, and have a market, then it's just manufacturing, and for many business concerns, negative data is worth the same as positive, because it refines where to put there research efforts, which there competition will have to guess at.again 1000kg's , crazy!, makes building the module SO EASY, mass to BURN baby, go! go! go!

More of that generous absurdity from you, please.

This isn't more absurd, but may offer a potentially better payoff than microgravitated materials, fundamentally

  Evolve bony vertebrates to thrive in microgravity. Use that learning to genetically enhance humans

The time when we will be able to modify vertebrates to thrive in microgravity is much farther in the future than the time when we will be able to build interplanetary ships with artificial gravity generated by rotation.

The former requires some scientific breakthroughs for which it is unpredictable when they will happen.

The latter is an engineering problem with very little unknowns, which is guaranteed to be solvable today if enough money are provided for it.

Until now, the additional costs for rotating ships could be avoided, as long as humans did not go farther away than the Moon.

For an expedition to Mars or even to some more distant celestial body, currently there is no known way that would avoid severe health damage for the humans, without using artificial gravity.

The experiments on the ISS have shown that for mice a gravity of at least 2/3 of that of Earth is required to completely avoid all health problems, while a gravity of at least 1/3 of that of Earth is necessary to avoid the most dangerous health problems.

It is unlikely that humans will prove to be much more resilient than mice.

Ont should start rightaway exactly because it's so faraway. I'm also comparing to all the materials research that are being suggested here, for which breakthroughs seem ... quite impossible?

And out there, you have free radiation for that accelerated evolution..

What if zero g is the best or only place to manufacture something? Varda grows crystals in space to make medicine that works better than when grown in a gravity well.

That is a valid argument but so far I'm not aware of anyone doing the complete calculation of what that could entail and which exact medicine could be cost efficient to manufacture like that.

But if that would be a real market case, then Elon's solution is actually the optimal one, and very similar to the possible approach which more knowledgeable space analysts said for years. Basically it is super pointless for humans now to have big manned space stations for any economical purposes. We should build them of course, but they will be a net loss for centuries. If any space research or space manufacturing would be required by the market, then one-off space missions are the only rational way to do it cheaply. Something like the platform showcased here, or something bigger, like a converted Dragon/Cygnus/etc. ship into a mini lab. Commercial Space Stations is a bunk program, specifically in the word "Commercial".

I disagree.

Commercial manufacturing in space can be economically viable, as long as most of the components do not come from Earth.

If you build titanium stations in space, but all your titanium come from the moon, the price structure is wildly different. The price of shipping material is the price of building a railgun on the moon.

Absolutely not cheap,but the operating cost afterward is very low. And since the moon is geolocked, you can target any lagrange point with very good precision.

There will still be a need for components coming from earth, but the moon should be able to send all the material for structural parts (titanium), and also solar panels.

> The price of shipping material is the price of building a railgun on the moon.

This would be very unfortunate. Luckily, we only need to build the rail gun (and the mining/refining facilities) once. After that, the cost is marginal.

I wouldn't call a maintenance and ops for a large energy intensive Lunar structure "marginal". The dust is going to be a major pain permanently. Powering the system will be a pain, cooling both railgun and power generation for it will be an incredible feat of engineering. And that's just the initial hurdles of what I suspect would be a thick book list just the problems.

PS: I would also leave it to everyone to evaluate how many seconds would this railgun keep existing until the other superpower will blow it up to pieces, "just in case". Question works the same for any owner and any opponent pairing.

The blowing up part is very valid - humanity will need to grow up before we can make such a thing, but the rest stays - once it’s built, we only need to maintain it, and we can design for low maintenance.

> it is economically unfeasible to manufacture or mine anything in space if it needs to be transported down or up

leave it in space then; massive star ships shouldnt need to come down to planets anyway

> massive star ships

LOL.

>>it is economically unfeasible to manufacture or mine anything in space if it needs to be transported down or up the gravity well of any planet

Hydrolysis can be used to make Hydrogen, so as long you have enough ice. You fill it up with fuel needed to go up again, and send in down with the gravity well with the payload.

Space datacentres are an extremely silly idea.