Launching anything into space is heinously expensive. And CO2 emissive.
With very generous math, you’d need a radiator like a mile across to cool a space data center, but practically? Larger.
Datacenter hardware is unreliable and goes obsolete quickly, and any kind of maintenance in space is basically cost prohibitive.
There are other smaller yet still crippling engineering challenges, like bit flips from radiation (which gets move severe as lithography shrinks; look up Nvidia’s research on this), assembling large structures in space reliably, cooling loops for such gigantic structures, and extremely difficult/expensive networking (with distinct issues in LEO or geosynchronous).
And most of all… Solar is dirt cheap on Earth, compared to that.
So is just sticking a pipe in the ground for a geothermal loop, or ambient radiative cooling. We literally have tons of mass to dissipate heat into for free, instead of having to radiate it thermally, yet that’s too expensive for ground data centers, apparently.
That’s the joke.
It’s like saying “air conditioning is difficult” and proposing “I know! Let’s live under the Antarctic ice sheet!” That’s not hyperbole. It might be more practical, actually, as getting mass there is waaaay cheaper…
I hate that the anti AI stuff is 90% idiotic planning permission and capitalism, 5% “The idiots making this put no effort into it” and 5% “I just don’t like it, yuck”.
See this comment for math and specifics: https://lemmy.world/post/38090104/20233592
But the TL;DR version:
Launching anything into space is heinously expensive. And CO2 emissive.
With very generous math, you’d need a radiator like a mile across to cool a space data center, but practically? Larger.
Datacenter hardware is unreliable and goes obsolete quickly, and any kind of maintenance in space is basically cost prohibitive.
There are other smaller yet still crippling engineering challenges, like bit flips from radiation (which gets move severe as lithography shrinks; look up Nvidia’s research on this), assembling large structures in space reliably, cooling loops for such gigantic structures, and extremely difficult/expensive networking (with distinct issues in LEO or geosynchronous).
And most of all… Solar is dirt cheap on Earth, compared to that.
So is just sticking a pipe in the ground for a geothermal loop, or ambient radiative cooling. We literally have tons of mass to dissipate heat into for free, instead of having to radiate it thermally, yet that’s too expensive for ground data centers, apparently.
That’s the joke.
It’s like saying “air conditioning is difficult” and proposing “I know! Let’s live under the Antarctic ice sheet!” That’s not hyperbole. It might be more practical, actually, as getting mass there is waaaay cheaper…
I hate that the anti AI stuff is 90% idiotic planning permission and capitalism, 5% “The idiots making this put no effort into it” and 5% “I just don’t like it, yuck”.