Comment on Elon Musk Is Rolling xAI Into SpaceX—Creating the World’s Most Valuable Private Company
RamRabbit@lemmy.world 2 days ago14 kW
This is a tiny amount of power. My house alone can feed and service over 3x that (48 kW). Feeding my house with 48 kW and dissipating the heat is MUCH MUCH MUCH cheaper than doing this even once on the ISS, then twice, then thrice on this ISS…just to achieve what my home achieves right now.
Space datacenters are a meme.
swicano@programming.dev 2 days ago
You don’t use 48 kW you have 48kW capacity, that’d be 33 (1500W) electric space heaters running nonstop 24/7. I have electric heat, electric oven/range, and an electric car and I averaged 3 kW across the last week. (406 kWh between the 26th and 1st)
A comparison that is reasonable is an h100 rack cluster like this which uses about 60 kW per rack. For input power, the newer iROSA solar panels generate about 20 kW at a size of 20ft x 60ft each. Throw in 4 of those radiators, and you have something that is feasible to throw into space. Again, I can’t judge the economics of launching and running a space based datacenter business, but you could absolutely launch and operate a space rack with current tech.
RamRabbit@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The ISS is one of the most expensive pieces of infrastructure humanity has built, it costs something on the order of $150B. My home I personally paid for, out of my own pocket, and it has 3x it’s power power supply of the ISS.
How about this. You give me 10% of the cost of the ISS and that datacenter rack, and I’ll use the $15,000,000,000 to buy a big AC unit to cool the rack. We both make out. You saved 10x your money and got 3x as much power capacity, and I got FIFTEEN BILLION DOLLARS to service and maintain a residential sized power line.
swicano@programming.dev 2 days ago
If your argument was one of cost, you should have said so from the start! Economically, it might or might not make sense. I can’t pretend to know the economics of running a space based datacenter, I’ve never run a ground based datacenter.
But you have been arguing about power and electricity and heat and how proud you are to have 200a service at your house (congrats btw) but those aren’t the dealbreakers. If the AI bros want to lose billions putting the datacenters in space, I don’t have a huge problem with that. Better that than diddling kids and destroying society, which is what they seem to be spending their money on now.