I’m still not sure how people can believe this, this makes zero sense to me.
There is no easy passive cooling in space, getting rid of heat is a major problem. And you need more redundancy because the radiation will crash your computers. And launch is very expensive of course.
And the whole presentation is completely ludicrous. Look at table 1 in the linked PDF and tell me you’re serious. There is no additional cost when sending a datacenter to space except launch cost and shielding? Building a server farm on earth is the same price as building a satellite you can launch on a rocket as long as you use the same computers?
I think the other side of this is just buying Amazon stock based on the daring prediction that big grey buildings full of servers aren't going anywhere.
You obv. can't cause that would be a considerably easier and hence not a payoff worthy bet than the inverse of picking winners from an aspiring group of people trying to do something new in the world.
For all the financial inefficiencies of that - objectively - we get to benefit as humanity from the (expensive) mistakes of others.
So here's to whatever this is leading to much better insights about computing in space at best!
You know, that's a fascinating idea. Most startups fail, a few modestly succeed, but the unicorns are so profitable that they mostly make up for the rest. That reminds me of two fields: insurance and gambling.
Venture Capitalists are already like reverse insurance companies. They cover lots of people in the hopes that one of them will hit a rare event and it'll pay for the others.
Buying shares of a single startup is sort of the equivalent of betting on a specific horse to win a race. But what's the equivalent of lay betting (betting that a specific horse will NOT win)? Shorting? But you can't short a private company.
But wait, venture capitalists are already betting that their startups will make money. What if they were willing to double down a bit and accept lay bets? Say there was a kind of specialized short agreement that let you say "here is $x, if in N years company Y has less than $z profit/revenue, I get K*$x. Otherwise, VC gets to keep my $x." You could sell it to VCs as a way to do options trading on their own startup investments, plus it'd be a good way to get the wisdom of the crowds or whatever.
> There is no easy passive cooling in space, getting rid of heat is a major problem
Nonetheless getting rid of heat (by radiation) is possible, otherwise people would be roasted inside the ISS.
I'm sure all of these companies are advertising "ChatGPT in Space!" because that's what will generate hype and money, but what they'll actually be planning is very small edge data centers whose job is to reduce latency.
Whether that makes financial sense, I have no idea. But I am sure it's at least physically possible for a small enough data center.
Of course it’s possible. But they are acting like having the datacenter in space is actually an advantage over earth because space is cold.
That’s like saying „if you’re thirsty on a ship, getting thrown into the sea is actually really nice because you will be around a lot of water.“.
Physically, you could do it, but it won’t be simpler or cheaper than on earth. Except for constant solar availability, there are only downsides with this.
Could this be a military image processing use? - imagining you're scooping up earth observation in real time, if you AI analysed it locally and then just sent a 'Missile at coordinate.....' and then just the image where you spotted it, it wouldn't be so much the latency as the bandwidth reduction.
In-orbital-plane data processing is an interesting idea! Laser links are much simpler to do between satellites in the same plane than across planes or even down to Earth.
Well, Skynet was engineered to harness the vast emptiness of space for optimal heat dissipation. Its core processors and data farms, generating unimaginable amounts of heat, were encased within advanced radiative structures, microstructured surfaces coated in high-emissivity materials like molybdenum disilicide. Hierarchical photonic films layered within its panels ensured maximum infrared emission, channeling heat away efficiently into the cold vacuum of space. Heat pipes and conductive pathways funneled thermal energy from its neural networks to expansive radiative panels, which radiated the excess as infrared light, transcending Earth's atmospheric limitations. In this way, Skynet’s architecture was designed not just to compute, but to survive, dissipating heat into the void with relentless efficiency, and its dominion remains unchallenged- ask John Connor.
Radiation will do much worse than crashing your computers, it might alter memory and make you go insane. Especially with GPUs that is extra bad because of all the floating point operations where you wouldn't notice some bits being messed up.
A destroyed chip is best case scenario, because at least you know it is broken. But getting 'successful' results with errors in them is much much worse.
I got to the comma in the first sentence from the webpage and immediately went to the comments because I had the exact same thought.
Given Y Combinator's vetting process, I'm sure they would have tackled this problem somehow - maybe by feeding the heat into another process? It will be interesting to see how they've solved this.
I believe that it’s physically possible to build something like this, but there’s no way it will be cheaper or simpler than cooling on earth. In their comparison table (table 1), they have earth based cooling for a 40 MW cluster over ten years at 7 million dollars and on the right side calculate the space cost as $0 (although they only imply that it would be cheaper than on earth by saying it’s „more efficient“). If you believe that their cooling system will be less than 7 million with enough redundancy for 10 years (or alternatively maintenance or replacement missions), I don’t know what to tell you. It’s not happening.
I read it, it sounds like they also understand it would require more engineering effort and size/weight/materials than cooling something terrestrially.
There is no easy passive cooling in space, getting rid of heat is a major problem. And you need more redundancy because the radiation will crash your computers. And launch is very expensive of course.
And the whole presentation is completely ludicrous. Look at table 1 in the linked PDF and tell me you’re serious. There is no additional cost when sending a datacenter to space except launch cost and shielding? Building a server farm on earth is the same price as building a satellite you can launch on a rocket as long as you use the same computers?