this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2025
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Hardware

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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says AI compute in space will be the lowest-cost option in 5 years — but Nvidia's Jensen Huang says it's a 'dream' (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 1 day ago by Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world to c/hardware@lemmy.world
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[–] AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 24 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Server farms, especially ones with tons of GPUs, see little benefit from being in LEO. They cannot radiate heat efficiently, especially this amount of heat. Plus, unless boosted every now and then, they'll eventually burn up.

How do you fix a hardware issue up there?

None of it adds up on the balance sheet. It makes zero sense to do this in space. The only benefit is hyping up the AI market because space. That benefit won't last very long in our newscycle.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I did the math for it, and you'd need a radiator at least a kilometer wide for a 'typical' datacenter setup, according to the equation here: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/heatrad.php

A = P / (ε * σ * T^4), where

P = the power of waste heat the radiator can get rid of (watts)

σ = 5.670373×10-8 = Stefan-Boltzmann constant (W m-2K-4)

ε = emissivity of radiator (theoretical maximum is 1.0 for a perfect black body, real world radiator will be less. Should be at least 0.8 or above to be worth-while)

A = area of radiator (m2)

T = temperature of radiator, this assumes temperature of space is zero degrees (degrees K)

x^4 = raise x to the fourth power, i.e, x * x * x * x

Probably bigger if you don't want the coolant to be boiling hot.

...Do you know how expensive that would be?

I'll give you a hint: orders of magnitude more expensive than geothermal loops for Earth-based datacenters. And even those are apparently too expensive for them to construct.

Musk is completely delusional, and he's surrounded by yes men telling him want he wants to hear.