Google and SpaceX are in talks to build data centers in orbit, pitching space as the future home for AI compute, even as costs today remain far higher than on the ground.
Data centers are “centers”, because they require vast amounts of resources to run appropriately. Resources we don’t have in the vacuum of space. You can’t even dissipate heat, which is the primary thing data centers are screwing people the world over on right now.
The ISS has a lot of big solar panels. The other big panels they have are thermal radiators.
They have to have quite large thermal radiators because it’s very inefficient. The ISS has people and a very small amount of computing power.
Data centers generate several orders of magnitude more heat. You would need several orders of magnitude more thermal radiators than you would solar panels. The bigger you make the data center, which is important for density since you’re introducing a lot of lag due to the speed of light, the less room you have to put thermal radiators or solar panels.
Then you need to work out how to get spare servers, and/or server parts up and down from the Data Center. All of these things are consumables, and all of them have significantly more wear and tear outside of the Earth’s atmosphere.
It is possible. It is not efficient or sensible. It sounds cool, it doesn’t require buying land, and there aren’t currently international agreements about doing dumb stuff in space in the same way there are for doing dumb stuff in the ocean.
More so these are not giant data centers they are just satellites acting as a data center. So perhaps larger than a typical communication satellite but nothing like a giant warehouse that we would have on the ground.
That makes absolutely no sense.
Data centers are “centers”, because they require vast amounts of resources to run appropriately. Resources we don’t have in the vacuum of space. You can’t even dissipate heat, which is the primary thing data centers are screwing people the world over on right now.
of course you can, by thermal radiation. Power by solar panels which can generate a lot without atmosphere filtering sun energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_thermal_control
The ISS has a lot of big solar panels. The other big panels they have are thermal radiators.
They have to have quite large thermal radiators because it’s very inefficient. The ISS has people and a very small amount of computing power.
Data centers generate several orders of magnitude more heat. You would need several orders of magnitude more thermal radiators than you would solar panels. The bigger you make the data center, which is important for density since you’re introducing a lot of lag due to the speed of light, the less room you have to put thermal radiators or solar panels.
Then you need to work out how to get spare servers, and/or server parts up and down from the Data Center. All of these things are consumables, and all of them have significantly more wear and tear outside of the Earth’s atmosphere.
It is possible. It is not efficient or sensible. It sounds cool, it doesn’t require buying land, and there aren’t currently international agreements about doing dumb stuff in space in the same way there are for doing dumb stuff in the ocean.
More so these are not giant data centers they are just satellites acting as a data center. So perhaps larger than a typical communication satellite but nothing like a giant warehouse that we would have on the ground.