I think they’re a great idea. They don’t use land, don’t continuously use water, and don’t pollute our land and waterways. And, as an added bonus, they’re extremely expensive and a money-pit.
If they build a data center on land and an identical one floating on the ocean, what is the difference in how much heat they emit when I throw thermite grenades at them?
as much as underwater datacenter, extremely high cost despite the ocean being able to cooldown datacenters fast. also these large LLM have never overcome one major flaw, There is no profit generation in the industry.
There is no profit generation in the industry.
That’s because we’re in relatively early R&D and are trying to speedrun things in a way we generally don’t with most tech. To compare to tech you understand and are familiar with, where we’re at currently would be equivalent to like the internet in the late 80s/early 90s, except we’ve all seen how that went and everyone wants to be the Amazon, Microsoft or Google of the AI market when it moves from high R&D and little to no profit to becoming a mainstream part of everyday life.
That transition point will probably be when bipedal robots that can do most tasks as well as a human while running a local model get cheap enough to be sold as industrial equipment. It’s why Asian labs (especially Chinese ones) keep showing off bipedal robots doing tasks that require either significant agility or fine motor skills involving predicting where body parts are (like doing needlepoint without being able to see it’s hands or doing dance routines).
You could put em on the moon with a heatpump into the ground.
The cost per pound to get them there is insane.
They are seriously old in 2 years.
They could put them in deserts here with closed loop cooling.
or… hear me out… Maybe we DON’T NEED THAT MUCH AI…
You could put em on the moon with a heatpump into the ground.
The interior of the moon is not super cold. You could still run a heat pump, but I don’t know what the conductivity is like.
“Near” the surface, it’s apparently around -21C, but its one crazy trick is surface area for heat sync. Once we start pushing heat into it, we’d have to do it in a REALLY huge surface area. Moon trenching…
If you read the chart on that Wikipedia article carefully, the estimated temperature profile is based on data from two Apollo missions.
All of the Apollo missions spent all of their surface time during the lunar morning, relatively early into the 14-day lunar day. They did this partially because the cooling systems couldn’t cope with the full heat of the day, and partially to ensure good backlighting during the landings.
So there is going to be some “diurnal” surface heating and cooling that is probably modeled but not measured.
God almighty
At least their water consumption would do down. Let’s do it, shoot the tech bros up there with them. Let’s even overshoot the orbit and make them disappear in the darkness.
No let’s not do that. Building these slopstations will only contribute to the build up of space debris. Making it harder for future generations to have access to the stars. Just shoot them into a mountain side, or the ocean floor instead. Far more economical too.
Could even make it easier, cheaper and avoid the ecological disaster as well
Just shoot them
Water consumption has been way overblown. Sure if you’re in the Colorado River basin, water is absolutely an issue. But if your concerned with wasted water usage, all data centers combined would be a rounding error compared to what we throw away on turf grass.
Kyle Hill and Hank Green have both made videos about this I’m not crazy.
I’ll watch these after work, but surely the problem is not availability of water, but drinking water, which is another story? Data centers aim for clean water sources which can be used for drinking. Turf grass don’t need that which makes the comparison seem unfair
I live in California and am required to water a lawn as a renter with my drinking water. Turf grass may not need drinking water, but I’d guess the portion of water used for grass that is recycled is not particularly high.
You may also be surprised about what makes water “drinking water”. There’s a water project in San Diego that is aiming to close the water loop by purifying all wastewater using RO and UV, to the point that it is lab-quality pure water. It’s illegal to add minerals to it and pump it into the municipal water supply. They have to discharge it into a river first and let it have a certain “residence time” in an open air reservoir. The water we drink here isn’t much more than lake water, and far less clean than the water that can be made by recycling wastewater.
It just depends on the location.
Some areas have water shortages where resources are already strained and other areas have abundant water so that no amount of usage will make a dent.
It not that it isn’t a problem at all, it’s just it is only a problem in specific places and not an inherent issue with datacenters everywhere. Building datacenters in a desert would cause water issues, building them near the great lakes wouldn’t impact water availability in the slightest.
They do prefer drinking water, because it’s already treated and so the equipment/maintenance to use it is lower and they can just evaporate it away. In other areas, or if required by legislation, they could run coolant to the machines and then cool the coolant using dirtier sources (including seawater).
Eliminating heat is like one of the hardest space problems 🦙
Seems to me that maintenance would be significant.
They’re utterly impracticable and inefficient. Things cool very slowly in the vacuum of space.
Maybe but also maybe they would hire my uncle and then he could go to space which would be pretty cool.
It’s easier to teach data centre engineers to be astronauts than teach astronauts to plug in a SATA drive
SpaceX IPO happened to keep xAi afloat.
Servers in space topic exist because of this very reason.
It is a non subject
LOL LOL you CANNOT cool something like that in space. The entire concept is flawed.
You can, they just have to be smaller rather than a massive single orbital data centrer like this proposal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlQYU3m1e80
Still not a great idea because of the economics, but the same can be said for the data center build out on earth too, so why would they let that stop them?
For a single satellite, we’d need a football sized array for heat dissipation. The dissipation capacity isn’t equal across the entire array. And you need some way to move the heat from the centre out towards the edges.
And aside from that, 100k satellites is the limit of objects we can put into low earth orbit before we start risking cascade collisions that break everything into small bits and make getting anything into orbit impossible. We’re currently at 14k objects. Space X is proposing ONE MILLION satellites. And they’ll each need huge heat dissipation arrays.
That simply isn’t true, the video I linked explains everything clearly, for a 20kw satellite the cooling area is needed very modest.
Still not a great idea and I am not advocating for it, but people need to stop fighting bullshit with bullshit and start fighting it with truth.
A 20KW data center is utterly feeble, barely worth the name, by ground-based data center standards, which easily go into tens of megawatts.
I know who Scott Manley is. I’m subbed to his channel and saw that video when it came out.
That being said, one of the top comments in that video is someone who, claims to be, a spacecraft thermal engineer. And they bring up a few good points. But the one I’m most interested in is the loss of efficiency in heat dissipation the further the heat is pushed along the array. Which means you can’t treat the entire surface area of the dissipation array at equal performance, so you need an even bigger array.
And btw, a 20kw satellite is peanuts for AI workloads. Which is the reason they’re suggesting putting up a million of these. And that right there is, IMO, the biggest issue. We’re already at 14k satellites (most of those are Star Link). And 100k satellites is the current figure we expect collisions between satellites to start becoming unavoidable, with the possibility of an out of control cascade of collision becoming a major concern from there upwards.
I think Kyle Hill did a better job at being objective on the problem:
For scale. roughly a two server datacenter needs to have solar and radiator about as big as the ISS.
Which is possible, but insane. However insane plain old datacenter is, just tons more insane.
That simply isn’t true, the video I linked explains everything clearly, for a 20kw satellite the cooling area is needed very modest.
Still not a great idea and I am not advocating for it, but people need to stop fighting bullshit with bullshit and start fighting it with truth.
How far can this bubble possibly stretch?
AI Derangement Syndrome
- slow clap *
Does that moniker apply to the ones who support or criticize it?
Love the idiot in the article comments saying „the heat is immediately removed into the vacuum of space“. What is the thermal conductivity of a vacuum, genius?
Are we talking about a vacuum of copper or a vacuum of feathers
this place is officially retarded if I bring up the fact that there is such thing as radiation or radiating energy i’ll get called a datacenter lover. you people fucking suck
No you’re just confident despite your ignorance. Turning waste heat into electromagnetic radiation is not easy or efficient - 100 to 350W per square meter in current space craft. The sheer scale of radiators necessary in a orbital data centre would dwarf the footprint of the servers themselves.
See exactly. I bring up the fact that radiation exists because you obviously don’t know what you are talking about and to desperately try to stay right you invent in your head that I am ideologically against you. You need your echo chamber do you jackass?
Perhaps you can educate us instead of being mad at the world?
Thanks but I’d like to not read Billy Madison’s lecture on thermal dynamics based on magic and fairy dust.
I don’t know if you realize this but losing heat by radiating it away is incredibly slow and inefficient.
I don’t know if you realise this but that doesn’t matter. I am not advocating for anything so you are not disagreeing with me. We are both informing this jackass that thinks because there is no air in space that heat can not be dissipated. This is not a matter of if datacenters are a good idea or not. Bro come on I said it, this place is officially retarded and you people fucking suck.
It does matter because it means it’s not a solution.
Never said it was. But if you want a solution NASA figured it out almost 3 quarters of a century ago. If the cooling solution is the thread that makes or breaks the concept sure you could justify being this irrational I guess or you could find the next better reason to be against data centers in space. Upto you.
You just need something like ~256,000 m² or like 60% the size of vatican city of radiators to dissipate 1mw power at 300k, I calculated it https://crazypeople.online/post/20952535/9448375
Cool a material topology problem, so when scientists and engineers figure out how to do it what then? Is your only reason for being against datacenters in space is because you think they cannot be cooled? You cannot come up with any other argument that you could just use instead? Presuming you are picking up their torch math guy?
You sound like you think you’re making a point but you’re kinda just saying nonsense in the face of this not being viable.
Black body radiation is a real, but it’s an extremely inefficient way to get rid of excess heat. So you’d need huge radiators to get enough surface area.
Add to this the fact that terrestrial data centers operate at a loss, and there’s no way to run a space based one profitably.
plus trying to dissipate heat in space, which is mostly a vacumn is a problem too.
“Black body radiation” is the physical process by which you “dissipate” (the correct word here is “radiate”) heat in space.
In space you can’t just have the heat be passed from the radiator to some “substance” that fills space (like on Earth the heat is passed to air or to water that then gets released to the environment) because almost all of space is empty of matter (not exactly: there’s incredibly low density stuff in it, mainly ions, but such low density means pretty much no available mass to sink the heat), so the only way for that heat to leave is the natural physical process of a warm body emitting photons merely because of its temperature (the wavelength of which depends on temperature) which is called Black Body Radiation.
As others have pointed out, it’s a way less efficient process that dissipating heat by it being passed from the radiator directly to some substance that’s part of the environment (i.e. transmission).
Cool man. The second bit was not needed. And the first bit you should send to the first the OP. You can quote me advocating for datacenters or you can suck my dick you dumb cunt.
Man, you can’t be this pedantic and this incorrect, all at the same time.
The “there is no air in space therefore datacenters in space are a bad idea” crew is not going away. Are you even human?
Check how many square meters of copper radiators per human you need on ISS and then do the math kwh for a datacenter and you will get more tonnes of material than any material on the hole planet earth and now you understand why it’s your idea that’s removed from any intelligent discourse.
Or why would I bother educating you. Go and invest in companies building data centers in space, vote for them, idc
Why bother at all telling me crap that is not relevant to the original acting like you are superior. Ride off knob jocky.
When i did i say anything of that? Are you ok buddy?
Yea keep them coming
We got Musk fanboys on Lemmy before GTA 6.
You don’t understand how heat dissipation works.
Please reconsider your use of the “R” word. It is not harmless. People try to say “it just means stupid” but we all know what people that word refers to. They also know this word, and know it’s used in reference to them.
They don’t deserve it. My wife, for example, used to teach Shakespeare in theatrical classes in the adult day school she worked at. Her student absolutely were capable of learning that and understanding it fully.
Yeah, language evolves over time. But just as I hope you wouldn’t call a Black person “colored” because that term is currently not appreciated (even though it was the preferred in decades past), I hope you would consider removing the “R” word from your vocabulary as well.
They’re arguing in favor of AI. They already don’t care about other people, unfortunately.
Could you imagine being in orbit during an AI datacenter kessler collapse, and just getting smoked by an rtx 5070 travelling at mach fuck?
There’d be nothing less than gold plated B300s in a space datacenter. If they’re spending billions flying it up there, they’re not going to be putting mid-range consumer GPUs in there. The gold plating probably doesn’t even do anything for radiation shielding, the AI just told them to add it to help prop up the AI bubble.
The goal is that its single digits millions to fly it up there. In practice, it’ll be 10s of millions to start.
Grain of sand…
No credit for partial answers, maggot. This is an RTX 5070 Ti with 16G of GDDR7. It was shot out of a grok datacenter in heliosynchronous orbit at 1.3% the speed of light. You know what that means? That means Kevin O’Leary is the most dangerous son of a bitch in space.
Very useless and expensive idea.
