"we?"

we are not billionaires. wtf are they doing?

Really fucking hard. Because they demand high power, and any repairs are insanely expensive.

Fucking idiots.

So you need SpaceX to increase its launch capacity to somewhere between 20 to 80 times its current rate, completely reimagine the economics of space-based radiators and solar panels, accept that all that shiny new power and cooling CapEx is just as disposable as the GPUs, and you have to adjust the expected use cases and SLAs to allow for nothing being repairable and latency making them unsuitable for many AI tasks.

Yes. "Possible." I mean, I guess, but we've got some powerful Hyperloop energy here. I cannot imagine it ever being more economical than bullying and bribing rural areas with access to a power grid.

I always wondered how we planned for dissipating heat in space to be comparable to dissipating heat on earth. Feels like whatever they're using to handle that heat is going to have to be huge and heavy.

Has to be great for avoiding any legal obligations on how you might handle the data though. Can do whatever you want as long as it stays in space.

What are we doing?

We are allowing Psychopaths to get to the top in the perpetual Capitalist economic war - everybody against everybody else, no rules. Rich Psychopaths are now running Western societies as a private Fascist club, and they use their power to manage information/policies, so they are; not in any danger from 'socialism/communism' etc, able to create consent to attack their 'Evil' enemies (that just don't want Epstein psychos to control their nations future or resources), keep alternatives down, and just be able to keep hoarding power/wealth from the backs of ordinary people all around the world..

That is what Psychopaths do, they create chaos and exploit the situation for their own benefit - most often harming everyone else. Capitalism is inherently a psychopath ideology where exploitation and absolute selfishness is both the goal and highest morality. No wonder the ideology is promoted by the most powerful psychopaths that benefit from that belief. We could easily add the 2 'missing' prongs and just call 'Capitalism' a full Dark Triad belief-system (Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and Narcissism). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad

The rich removed - The Dark Triad Epstein Class - won bc they control the narrative and can manufacture consent for what they want.

So to YOU, that still believe in the Capitalist 'free market' dystopia/fantasy: Stop believing in/supporting their Dark Triad Capitalist belief-system and things will calm down by it self..

Its easy: IF the rich removed recommend it, you DON'T !

Google and Microsoft already tried underwater data centers to better handle heat dissipation. It wasn't worth it. Hardware can fail and you need somebody to go in and swap boards and faulty cables. Every complex system has multiple points of failure. The wrong board and the whole container stops working. It was so much pain trying to maintain it under water they all gave up after the Proof of Concept stage.

How are they going to deal with it cost effectively up in orbit? Little nanosat modules? Humanoid robots that barely work today?

Be a lot cheaper (and faster) sending a tech in a little cargo van and a toolbox out to the suburbs of Memphis, Phoenix, or Bakersfield.

This is a false front for laundering VC money. It’s not logistically feasible, and like AI, they will have made off with billions before they ever attempt to launch anything.

Typical “numba go up” scheme.

Wouldn't it still be cheaper to build megastructures on earth in remote and uninhabited places? Like I get you have to build your own power and run your own fiber if you say build a data center the size of Rhode Island in the Yukon or something, but that has to be more cost effective than orbital.

Taking it to orbit creates far more problems than it solves.

Space isn't cold the way cold environments are here on earth. The cold we experience on Earth is because we are surrounded by cold gases. Cold wind and cold air will wick heat away from objects. Because space lacks any atmosphere, all thermal transfer in space is radiative. In comparison to convective thermal transfer via air / atmosphere, radiative thermal transfer is abysmally slow, requiring expansive delicate heat sinks which must be carefully aimed and coated to facilitate thermal egress while impeding solar thermal ingress. If you've ever seen a picture of the space station, much of what you may think are solar panels are in fact heat sinks. You can't just stick a server container in orbit and call the job done.

Launch costs (yeah, Musk promised 100 tons to LEO Real Cheap, Real Soon, you better believe it) and energy requirements for launch kill this. If you could make DCs ISRU in space, well, good luck with that.

Boy, this superbubble is astronomic. Be sure to watch it when it blows.

It's not a good idea at all. The problems it creates are greater in both number and difficulty than the problems it solves.

One thing Eric Berger does not go into is bandwidth. There is a hell of a lot more bandwidth available in a single pair of optical fibers on the ground compared to SpaceX' fastest ground to air links.

They claim 1Tb/s for V3 starlink satelites. If that's true, a fiber pair provides at least 20 times that with utterly normal off the shelf DWDM components. And that's a single pair of fibers. Optical cables are often lain with 144 fibers, or 288 fibers.

answer: hard.

Hard enough that it's not worth it. Unless you're on the board of SpaceX about to make an IPO. Above the cloud: Building data centres in space

I work in this industry and its hard enough to get a GEO/LEO bird in the air let alone a data center...

His AI is already loosing money, and this looks to be massively expensive. Might a tired soul hope that this will put a serious dent in his hoardings?

Depends on what you arbitairally define as data center.

Try doing it while disqualifying the GPS constellation.

Solar panels and infrared heat disposal into space can both work just fine right here on the ground.

Ooh, I've seen this one. The secret is just to build them out of paperclips.

Just here to comment that I only pasted the title of the article as the title of the post. I find the content of the article interesting. I'm not actually asking that question, though answer it if you please.

I'd imagine not very hard, but then would it even be worth it? I'm imagining something like in Cyberpunk: an orbital digital prison where one company keeps its enemies' minds on chips that can be swapped to an entirely different person and overwrite their original personality.

I see two issues here: get all that stuff into a stable orbit, which would be a way bigger job than building the ISS, which is one of the most expensive projects ever undertaken. Second, it would have to have massive radiators to get rid of the generated heat.