Comment by GMoromisato

Comment by GMoromisato 4 days ago

There are 8,000+ Starlink satellites in orbit right now. Each one has about 30 square-meters of solar panels. That's 240,000 square meters. ISS has 25,000 square meters, so SpaceX has already launched almost 10-times the solar panels of ISS.

The next generation Starlink (V3) will have 250 square meters of solar panels per satellite, and they are planning on launching about 10,000 of them, so now you're at 2.5 million m^2 of panels or 100 times ISS.

All those satellites have their own radiators to manage heat. True, they lose some heat by beaming it to the ground, but data center satellites would just need proportionally larger radiators.

And, of course, all those satellite have CPUs and memory chips; they are already hardened to resist space radiation (or else they wouldn't function).

Almost every single objection to data centers in space has already been overcome at a smaller scale with Starlink. The only one that might apply is cost: if it's cheaper to build data centers on Earth, then space doesn't make sense (and it won't happen). But prices are always coming down in space, and prices on Earth keep going up (because of environmental restrictions).

kaashif 4 days ago

> The only one that might apply is cost: if it's cheaper to build data centers on Earth, then space doesn't make sense (and it won't happen).

So the only problem left to be solved is that space datacenters would be millions of times more expensive per unit of compute than a ground based datacenter. And cost millions of times more to maintain.

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GMoromisato 3 days ago

Starlink cost maybe $10 billion. A 100,000 gpu data center costs between $20 and $40 billion to build.
Also remember that data centers last for about 5 years; after that the gpus are obsolete. That’s no different than the lifetime of a Starlink satellite.

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- verzali 3 days ago
  
  Starlink solar panels generate at best 200 W/sqm on average. Even with 2.5 million square metres, that is a total of half a gigawatt. And the cost is not to be ignored! Most of the cost of these data centres is in the GPUs themselves, so you need to add that to the cost of building out the constellation. Unless you are arguing that the cost of supporting infrastructure (cooling, power, etc) costs $10bn to support half a gigawatt of GPUs in the typical data centre, then your numbers are simply way off.
  
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runako 3 days ago

Starlink solves for a problem where there is not a good alternative: high-speed Internet access for rural environments. Land-based solutions for this are potentially even more expensive than putting satellites in space.

But clearly Starlink is not competitive with widely-available residential Internet access offerings, and nowhere near what is expected of terrestrial data centers. People use Starlink when there are no other good options. In the urban areas where most people live, people use land-based ISPs because they are cheaper and better.

An example, by contrast: Trammell Crow is planning a 12 million square foot data center campus in Georgia that will be infinitely more maintainable and have access to better Internet connections than anything space bound. At $8.4B, it will be significantly less expensive than space bound alternatives.

There are better options than space for data centers, so space data centers are unlikely to be a thing. (Someone will probably do a trial for PR though.)

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santoshalper 4 days ago

The facts you quoted just made me even more convinced that space-based datacenters will not be cost effective any time soon. If an entire generation of satellites costing many billions of dollars can't power more GPUs than a single terrestrial datacenter, how could it possibly be cost effective?

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GMoromisato 3 days ago

A data center costs $20 to $40 billion! And launch costs keep dropping.
Plus, environmental costs of data centers keep rising.

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phsau 4 days ago

>Almost every single objection to data centers in space has already been overcome at a smaller scale with Starlink

Did you not read the article? It had many objections that make it clear datacenters in space are unworkable...

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GMoromisato 3 days ago

Starlink is already a small data center! It has power, radiators, and compute!
It needs to be scaled up, but there is no obstacle to that (at least none that the article mentions).
The only valid objection is cost, but space prices keep dropping and earth prices keep rising.

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- qayxc 3 days ago
  
  > Starlink is already a small data center! It has power, radiators, and compute!
  It is not. This is like saying your phone is already a small data centre. While technically true, we're not talking about the same scale here. StarLink's compute power is a tiny fraction of a modern data centre GPU/TPU. Most of the power budget goes into communication (i.e. its purpose!).
  
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morshu9001 4 days ago

At what price per MW of load?

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GMoromisato 3 days ago

The Starlink constellation cost $10 billion. That’s comparable to a small data center (maybe 50,000 gpus).
If launch costs keep dropping and environmental costs keep rising, space based data centers will make sense.

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- kiba 3 days ago
  
  Land cost will also start to matter, but probably not at the scale that Starlink is doing. Regardless, orbitals are real estate.
  
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- morshu9001 2 days ago
  
  Comparable in cost or capacity? Small datacenter is maybe around 20MW of compute.
  
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- nish__ 3 days ago
  
  What a ridiculous waste of money.
  
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  amitav1 3 days ago
  
  What? Starlink made $72,000,000 in net profit last year. How is that a waste of money?
  
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  nish__ 3 days ago
  
  Where are you getting those numbers? SpaceX is a private company.
  
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