The only thing that is "better" in space is the efficiency of solar energy. Everything else is harder and more expensive
* Rockets costs more than trucks for moving things around
* No water in space for cooling/heat transfer
* Heat dissipation is difficult because vacuum is the best insulator
* How do you repair one?
* network bandwidth is probably lower
From a rationalist perspective, provided SpaceX can launch at a low cost AND the problem of radiation shielding, cooling, maintenance can be solved, it will be almost a no-brainer to launch data centers into space.
Either the next administration declares data-centers to be unimportant (which is unlikely, China etc.), or they would want to offload them as far as possible. If space is an option, it will be taken provided it's cost efficient.
From another rationalist perspective, it will always be cheaper to run a data center somewhere on earth under any conceivable scenario. It would be easier and cheaper to put a data center in the ocean. Just a few of the significant issues:
1. Selling an old compute unit is a significant cost savings when they are replaced every five years. In space you basically have to write them off.
2. Cooling in space is limited. Not impossible but limited. And these things throw off massive amounts of heat. You are talking about huge heat sinks which take valuable space and add massive weight that limits space on the rocket.
3. The size per data center will be relatively minuscule OR they somehow have to assemble in space adding additional complexity.
4. Any launch, deployment, connectivity, or hardware failure is a total loss. So you have to account for that.
"You can play around with the cost sliders to estimate the economics, but even being quite optimistic, space data centers cost ~2-3x of their terrestrial counterparts."
The idea is marketing for the stock price and enterprise value. If SpaceX does do it, it'll be analogous to Tesla's "Supervised Full Self Driving." "We run a Kubernetes cluster with some models on the satellites."
What's the consensus on this? I feel like the packaging and heat dissipation issues need some work. Its much harder to fly electronics on a big noisy rocket than most people think
The only thing that is "better" in space is the efficiency of solar energy. Everything else is harder and more expensive
* Rockets costs more than trucks for moving things around * No water in space for cooling/heat transfer * Heat dissipation is difficult because vacuum is the best insulator * How do you repair one? * network bandwidth is probably lower
Don't forget the various types of damaging radiation that will be pummeling your expensive and delicate GPUs.
Exactly same problems which Microsoft faced during its underwater datacenter experiment and exactly same reasons why Microsoft ended this experiment.
> Everything else is harder and more expensive
permits? connectivity?
> permits? connectivity?
SpaceX may not looked upon favorably by the next US administration, with regards to permits to get to orbit.
From a rationalist perspective, provided SpaceX can launch at a low cost AND the problem of radiation shielding, cooling, maintenance can be solved, it will be almost a no-brainer to launch data centers into space.
Either the next administration declares data-centers to be unimportant (which is unlikely, China etc.), or they would want to offload them as far as possible. If space is an option, it will be taken provided it's cost efficient.
From another rationalist perspective, it will always be cheaper to run a data center somewhere on earth under any conceivable scenario. It would be easier and cheaper to put a data center in the ocean. Just a few of the significant issues:
1. Selling an old compute unit is a significant cost savings when they are replaced every five years. In space you basically have to write them off.
2. Cooling in space is limited. Not impossible but limited. And these things throw off massive amounts of heat. You are talking about huge heat sinks which take valuable space and add massive weight that limits space on the rocket.
3. The size per data center will be relatively minuscule OR they somehow have to assemble in space adding additional complexity.
4. Any launch, deployment, connectivity, or hardware failure is a total loss. So you have to account for that.
"You can play around with the cost sliders to estimate the economics, but even being quite optimistic, space data centers cost ~2-3x of their terrestrial counterparts."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48491425
The idea is marketing for the stock price and enterprise value. If SpaceX does do it, it'll be analogous to Tesla's "Supervised Full Self Driving." "We run a Kubernetes cluster with some models on the satellites."
https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters
If you see a datacenter in orbit, it means something went wrong on Earth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48935384 - July 2026 (0 comments)
The Space Data Centers Situation is Insane [video] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qpdUNMt2yg - June 27th, 2026
Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48490094 - June 2026 (107 comments)
(reply to your deleted share link from Claude: please don't reply with AI slop)
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Musk was confident we'd have people on Mars by the end of 2026, so maybe he's assuming we'll put the data centers there?
What's the consensus on this? I feel like the packaging and heat dissipation issues need some work. Its much harder to fly electronics on a big noisy rocket than most people think
Another one for https://elonmusk.today/