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“ Anything you can do in a terrestrial data center, I’m expecting to be able to be done in space,” Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston told CNBC.”

In theory, yes. But this cannot possibly be economical.

Any idea how much solar panels you’d need to power an entire data centre from space?

And how insanely much space you need for radiating away heat? There is no conduction or convection, so I’d love to see them try, and make this economically viable.





Beyond that what about protecting against latch-ups and bit flips due to radiation? The environment is significantly worse in space so short term faults and long term damage should be a concern. There's a reason why radiation hardened hardware uses chips with really large features.

Yeah I was wondering about that too, the far-greater exposure to radiation... I don't know anything about how well-mitigated that is these days, but I'm sure it's a huge factor they would have in mind?

The resulting LLMs will have space-brain-bit-rot.

I have an internet subscription for comments like this. Thanks for making my monday morning.

Microsoft gave up on underwater data centers after trail run. I suspect it also was uneconomical. Easier cooling doesn't help that much when servers are inaccessible for maintenance.



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