By coincidence, I was discussing something along this lines with my father the other day (who is interested in such things), and he told me that the James Webb telescope has a really fancy multi-layer parasol to protect it from Sunlight, Earthlight or Moonlight.
Solving the cooling problem here, as much as it's a problem worth solving, would be a massive double sided contraption. The data center would be sandwiched between it's solar array on one side and on the shaded side you would make a similar structure, but all coolant pipes and massive black wafers of metal that would act as the heat sink and would radiate that heat back into the darkness of space. Of course it's a massive target for micrometeors and being basically a giant plumbing apparatus, would fail in under a month.
Dumping heat into the atmosphere from data centres isn't a problem: it's utterly trivial compared to the sun making things warm. What's a problem is the pollution from fossil fuel energy generation, and local environmental damage if they start hoovering up huge quantities of water for cooling.
Incidentally, if you look at a picture of the International Space Station, it's got a load of "wings". It's frequently assumed they're all solar panels. The ones that look sort of shiny black/gold are solar panels, but about half of them are white, and they're the heat management system to stop the ISS cooking its inhabitants.
That's probably true, but small things do add up though.
Also a non-issue for a space based data center.
I'm not going to argue that it's better from a technical standpoint, because it clearly isn't. You also have the problem that maintenance becomes incredibly expensive. I'm just considering that with how much fossil fuels are being burned to keep all these pointless data centers processing, I'm not going to complain if they are going to move off world. Though I don't know how many years of operation will be required to offset the rocket launch...
No, I get you. Although in terms of fossil fuels, we can at least theoretically power data centres with solar, wind, nuclear etc. on Earth, whereas I think the majority of rockets used today to shunt stuff into orbit still work by burning hydrocarbons.
Solar power is much more efficient in outer space, but yeah, it just might never outweigh the amount of fossil fuel energy used to launch it.
Let's be fair, building Rapture as an AI datacenter has less problems for more benefits - the ocean is basically a giant heat sink, and most of it doesn't fall under any national laws. As for heat vs power, there's a class of chips that's much better than GPUs in both speed and power usage for the kind of processing used by current AI loads, but it's an ASIC and a lot of folks aren't comfortable enough that tensors will remain the approach to build datacenters that can only be used for that while GPUs can be used for some other purpose if the state of the art moves away from tensors.
That really depends, and usually no, in the strictest sense of the term. Fuels either tend to be oxygen/hydrogen, or very toxic volatile compounds. But not many hydrocarbons. Mind you, most rocket fuels take a lot of energy to synthesize, and many are extremely toxic, so it's not like it's safe or good.
futurism.com
Given who he is Elon would probably consider that a win.Soon only the white option will remainX Is In Such Dire Straits That Its Head of Product Says It Can't Afford to Display the Color Blue
After removing one of the site's three themes, X head of product Nikita Bier defended the change by saying it couldn't afford another color.
People better start leaving. Don't know why they're sticking around with this point? There's literally nothing left of value over there.Soon only the white option will remainX Is In Such Dire Straits That Its Head of Product Says It Can't Afford to Display the Color Blue
After removing one of the site's three themes, X head of product Nikita Bier defended the change by saying it couldn't afford another color.
There's a rumour that the reason Musk consolidated xAI (which absorbed FKA Twitter a year or so back) into SpaceX because of these sorts of financial issues. FKA Twitter is probably losing money, xAI is definitely losing money (like any AI firm), and one pundit I read suggested it was beneficial as SpaceX could more easily be used to prop them up.
courthousenews.com
finance.yahoo.com
fuelarc.com
