In a blog post, Musk said the acquisition was warranted because global electricity demand for AI cannot be met with “terrestrial solutions,” and Silicon Valley will soon need to build data centers in space to power its AI ambitions.
This dumb fuck. Unfortunately, his boosters will be all-in on this messaging. Whatever.
But data centers use tens to hundreds of megawatts. So we’re talking about thousands or tens of thousands of times the heat.
That was my stumbling block, too. Don’t think of it as taking a datacenter and putting it into space whole, think of it as taking 5 or 10 racks and putting that into space, and repeating till you have as much compute as a datacenter. So it’s basically the size of a schoolbus (same size as hubble telescope) and it has solar panels+ heat rejection like those of the ISS, and then bolt a starlink on the end, and you can put as many of those in orbit as you need.
Each part of the hardware is doable(ish), and if the nerds who actually run datacenters say the terrestrial energy/cooling cost numbers vs launch cost numbers make sense, I’m inclined to believe them even if I don’t get to see that math specifically. But right now it’s just AI bros saying the costs make sense, and I don’t as much believe them.
You’re right, but I don’t mind if he sends his stuff to outer space