It’s is on earth as well using solar and batteries. What is likely to get cheaper faster? Solar and batteries? Or lifting datacenters to space? The world is almost at the point of deploying 1TW/year of solar, and batteries are catching up. No space required. There aren't a lot of VC investment opportunities speeding the rate of solar and battery deployments though.
The argument probably is that battery advances require not yet existing tech via new chemistry etc while what they are proposing is basically just integrating tech that already exists
Just spitballing here, but what if you built it on Earth, and then used the savings to build a second one on the opposite side of Earth? Now you have equivalently continuous power via solar array and also, as a bonus, air.
Well I guess it's a good thing for them they actually did the math. Please show me where they sell you electricity at ~$0.002/kWh where it's politically stable enough to build super expensive datacenters.
Not an expert in this area, but I think that that "just" is hiding a lot of complexity. Plus you also need some remotely operated robots to mount the replacement.
Stationkeeping is not free, satellite monitoring is not free, and any replacement to any component is now a multi-year, at least 1+ million dollar affair (or most likely a complete replacement, since not many satellites have done in-situ repairs).
Power in needs to equal heat out, and that isn't easy in space. They, deceptively, claim that their novel solution is radiative cooling. Relying on radiation for cooling in space is the problem statement! Convective (as on Earth) is significantly more effective.
I'm not one of those idiots who would claim that "we should focus on terrestrial problems instead of space," but this idea seems to have only downsides.
> “We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology… there’s no way to get there without a breakthrough… we need fusion or we need radically cheaper solar plus storage or something” -Sam Altman
It's kind of depressing that the only way to make this tech better is to feed it more energy. (And apparently now to send it to space)
Can you please not post comments like this? Thoughtful criticism is welcome, of course, but this sort of thing isn't. Besides breaking the site guidelines, it takes threads in less interesting directions and evokes even worse comments from others. We're trying to avoid that here.
"Don't be snarky."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
Really, on second look, snark still feels justified here. The issue is with TFA. There is little room for a thoughtful comment in response to something transparent.
Some type of submissions will invariably not result in very deep discussion, when the topic itself is so shallow.
We need you (I don't mean you personally, of course, but all commenters here) to follow the site guidelines regardless of how bad an article is or you feel it is.
Someone else being wrong or some other post being bad isn't a reason to make things worse. Doing so just creates a downward spiral, which it's all too easy to fall into.
Tbh your moderation is normally very restrained and even handed so was a bit surprising to see you take down several borderline overly snarky comments in a row (that just so happen to be directed against VC investors or YC founders).
To me those comments seemed over the line, not borderline! I'd post the same replies wherever I saw comments like that, regardless of who or what they're about.
> The frigid vacuum of space should make cooling easier, too, because cooling systems are more efficient when the ambient temperature is lower.
(EDIT: I removed a significant amount of snark here - sorry dang!)
While greater ambient temperature differences do affect radiative cooling, this effect is, in almost all situations, dwarfed by the lack of any kind of conductive or convective cooling due to the aforementioned vacuum. If radiators can be made of indefinite size, there are ways to make this viable, but the construction and maintenance of such an array to handle the wattage of any sizeeable AI datacenter would be far beyond any space project we've done to date.
