Elon lets out a fart and everyone's running after it. This is another misguided attempt to pump-up their share price or give clueless investors the feeling that Google is leading the A.I. pack.
Orbital data centers are a stupid idea conjured up by Musk when he was taking mescaline or ketamine. Anyone with half a brain knows this doesn't make sense.
This definitely feels like Hyperloop, but for data centers instead - a really cool idea that falls apart the moment it meets contact with reality. The most bizarre thing is how any of this and the Hyperloop got any amount of funding and development beyond just an initial feasibility report.
> The satellite, dubbed MVP, is about the size of a refrigerator. Inside, it has four of Google’s custom TPU AI accelerators, which are used to train AI models and run inference to generate tokens for AI workloads.
Yeah, this is a science-fair project. They threw some cards in a box and are paying someone to launch it to generate idiotic news articles.
It still doesn’t make sense to me. Technological progress will likely only accelerate. These will be outdated within 2 years easily, and you can’t even recover the chips. The only benefits are the unlimited power without the bottlenecks on earth, lack of political pressure of course, and the low latency for processing satellite data since it doesn’t need to be sent down to earth. These don’t seem beneficial enough to waste this money. It would be good to hear from someone who knows more about this.
GPUs aren’t becoming outdated in practice. An H100 still rents for something like $3/hour. The only reason to take them offline today would be due to limited data centre capacity. In space, that doesn’t apply.
For now, at least, this market doesn’t behave like the one for CPUs which are more fungible and general purpose.
Rather than thinking about the value of a GPU over time, it’s more useful to think about the value of a model (or generation of models) that will run on the GPU.
Sol 6 launched last week. People will build products/agents/systems on Sol 6. Many of those will end up staying on that model for the lifetime of the end product, which means there will be long-term demand for the model, and that means long-term demand for the GPU set that the model runs on.
For now, at least, models are tuned to a specific GPU and don’t move to the newest hardware very easily.
At the end of the day, will the lifetime value of a GPU exceed the cost of launching it into space? That’s TBD. But there’s growing evidence it might.
I'm guessing this is part of the whole idea; to get data before its actually doable, and the cost is worth the early data to help with future development
Its running for 15 minutes and then must shut down for a long time to cool down. Thats exactly why those "science-fluencers" said its a dumb idea. This is far away from proving that its a viable idea.
> The cooling system will only be able to operate in brief spurts of about 15 minutes. After that, the TPUs need to shut down to allow the radiators to catch up.
What you said was just a statement, not something with evidence or reasoning for why it should work. How large of an area is required to dissipate that much heat in a vacuum at a constant rate?
Genuine question: why are there so many people up-in-arms on orbital data centers? Like they have a personally vested interest in ensuring their opinions on failure are correct? There are many people on HN that despise it and say it will not and will never work, but here we are, they are flying them up to space and presumably, will start working soon.
Because when things are getting built that obviously should not work, in one's view of the world, it threatens that view of the world. Finding out that your common sense and understating of basic physics and economics has a sizable hole is pretty unpleasant for most people.
But if the project fails, then the view of the world is proved correct again, which feels moderately pleasant.
>... but here we are, they are flying them up to space and presumably, will start working soon.
No, this isn't "here we are". This is not an orbital data center, this is just something that will test TPU cooling functionality in orbit for only 15 minutes at a time.
Everything about technological progress is like this. It props up their ego, and they risk nothing. The man in the arena is always dangerously close to being the villain.
Actually, some of us predicted exactly what’s about to happen: these companies will launch a handful of GPUs into space, declare that it’s “working”, and then continue to build out terrestrial data centers at orders of magnitude faster rate.
No one is saying it’s impossible to put operating GPUs in space. People are saying that the economics of this make zero sense, and there seem to be hard physical limits for how much you can change parts of the reasons why. This test does absolutely nothing to disprove that.
Soon the musical chairs game will come to a screeching halt. Interest rates are skyrocketing and not even a Presidential decree will make them come down.
To me it's clear the U.S. is heading for a default. Instead of toning down the deficit Trump made it much worse with his "Big Beautiful Bill" and is bankrupting the country.
What happens next is anyone's guess, but it won't be pretty.
Because it’s so fucking stupid for the stated benefits that you get
- people getting nerd sniped and explaining why it’s wrong
- people who assume it isn’t wrong given the level of competence these groups have demonstrated already and are incensed by what they feel are bald faced lies to pump up stock prices like has been done before
- people who think this is some conspiracy(rightly or wrongly) to surreptitiously get weapon platforms or other support for weapon platforms into space.
The majority of tradeoffs for data centers make them always better on the ground. Just due to maintenance and heat alone.
> There are many people on HN that despise it and say it will not and will never work, but here we are, they are flying them up to space and presumably, will start working soon.
This is the one Google says they can run in 15 minute bursts and I’ve yet to find where they document what the cooldown period is before they can run again.
Also 99% of people saying it’ll never work are talking economically, not that theoretically you could get something up that works in the laws of physics.
The reasons against doing this is obvious. Is there any coherent description of why someone would think it is a good idea? And I don't mean, like, delusional reasons, but an actually rational argument for "here is where it might work out and we need to try and measure to find out".
Google's blog post (https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/go...) describes the goal of the launch as "designed to gather in-orbit data on how our TPUs handle the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of space." That doesn't sound like a bad idea, obviously it might be useful to have dedicated machine learning hardware on spacecraft or satellites for local processing. Maybe they just framed it as an orbital data center test for marketing, because that's a trendy topic and sounds more newsworthy than "hardware durability test"?
What are the obvious reasons against it? I've heard lots of arguments that cooling will be a hard technical challenge and, given current equipment weights and launch costs, it's uneconomical. But is there an obvious reason this would be impossible?
Lots of technologies start out looking hard and economically infeasible. But if you invest in development, you're able to get a few breakthroughs, and suddenly, it's economically viable.
If they do get things to work out, the benefits seem obvious: 24/7 access to clean energy, not upsetting the people who'd rather not have a datacenter next door (or in the same state), and plenty of space to scale up.
Literally no one is saying it’s impossible. Of course it’s possible, and it may one day even be economically viable.
But Elon’s claim that by 2027, the cheapest place to put data centers will be in space? Yeah, that’s impossible. But then again, only a fool would believe him at this point.
I highly doubt that space data centers will be more advantageous than terrestrial before 2035, and that’s very optimistic.
I agree with you about Elon Musk's claims, but that's not what we're discussing here.
If it takes until 2035 or even 2045 for space data centers to have an economic advantage, it still seems like a good investment for a company like Google to be working on this.
And FWIW, I have heard quite a few people claiming that economically viable space data centers would "go against the laws of physics", etc.
The obvious argument in favor that I see: Seizing such a data center is exceedingly difficult and destroying one would be a major international incident
I don't think it will even come close to being economically feasible. But the main arguments are that you get a lot more and constant solar power and you avoid permitting/regulations on earth.
It needs a single use case to justify its existence. And I am pretty sure it has one.
The question is will google reveal it? Probably not.
Even as some sort of failsafe compute for when some meteor hits the earth - already enough for a government to pay 10000x premium for it and it will bring in cash.
Obviously this is not intended to play in the same league as common enterprise datacenter.
No one is going to give a shit about compute if an asteroid hits us. If we survive it, it’ll turn into a resource war within weeks. We’ll be back to the Stone Age.
The only feasible thing I can see is jurisdiction related and that’s not something we should be encouraging. I mean we’ll just end up jamming data centres from the ground.
Orbital data centers are a stupid idea conjured up by Musk when he was taking mescaline or ketamine. Anyone with half a brain knows this doesn't make sense.
Yeah, this is a science-fair project. They threw some cards in a box and are paying someone to launch it to generate idiotic news articles.
For now, at least, this market doesn’t behave like the one for CPUs which are more fungible and general purpose.
Rather than thinking about the value of a GPU over time, it’s more useful to think about the value of a model (or generation of models) that will run on the GPU.
Sol 6 launched last week. People will build products/agents/systems on Sol 6. Many of those will end up staying on that model for the lifetime of the end product, which means there will be long-term demand for the model, and that means long-term demand for the GPU set that the model runs on.
For now, at least, models are tuned to a specific GPU and don’t move to the newest hardware very easily.
At the end of the day, will the lifetime value of a GPU exceed the cost of launching it into space? That’s TBD. But there’s growing evidence it might.
I'm guessing this is part of the whole idea; to get data before its actually doable, and the cost is worth the early data to help with future development
Curious to see if the experiment changes our understanding of space radiators at a certain scale for non-space exploration purposes.
Edit: @kieranmaine thanks! Wonder how long they have to wait to turn them on again.
> The cooling system will only be able to operate in brief spurts of about 15 minutes. After that, the TPUs need to shut down to allow the radiators to catch up.
It's a ground-targeting offensive system to be clear, not just missile defense.
But if the project fails, then the view of the world is proved correct again, which feels moderately pleasant.
>... but here we are, they are flying them up to space and presumably, will start working soon.
No, this isn't "here we are". This is not an orbital data center, this is just something that will test TPU cooling functionality in orbit for only 15 minutes at a time.
No one is saying it’s impossible to put operating GPUs in space. People are saying that the economics of this make zero sense, and there seem to be hard physical limits for how much you can change parts of the reasons why. This test does absolutely nothing to disprove that.
Economics are another matter.
Look at the article: they threw 4 cards in a box and launched it. It works for 15 minutes and then it has to snooze for who-knows-how-long.
To me it's clear the U.S. is heading for a default. Instead of toning down the deficit Trump made it much worse with his "Big Beautiful Bill" and is bankrupting the country.
What happens next is anyone's guess, but it won't be pretty.
- people getting nerd sniped and explaining why it’s wrong
- people who assume it isn’t wrong given the level of competence these groups have demonstrated already and are incensed by what they feel are bald faced lies to pump up stock prices like has been done before
- people who think this is some conspiracy(rightly or wrongly) to surreptitiously get weapon platforms or other support for weapon platforms into space.
The majority of tradeoffs for data centers make them always better on the ground. Just due to maintenance and heat alone.
> There are many people on HN that despise it and say it will not and will never work, but here we are, they are flying them up to space and presumably, will start working soon.
This is the one Google says they can run in 15 minute bursts and I’ve yet to find where they document what the cooldown period is before they can run again.
Also 99% of people saying it’ll never work are talking economically, not that theoretically you could get something up that works in the laws of physics.
Lots of technologies start out looking hard and economically infeasible. But if you invest in development, you're able to get a few breakthroughs, and suddenly, it's economically viable.
If they do get things to work out, the benefits seem obvious: 24/7 access to clean energy, not upsetting the people who'd rather not have a datacenter next door (or in the same state), and plenty of space to scale up.
But Elon’s claim that by 2027, the cheapest place to put data centers will be in space? Yeah, that’s impossible. But then again, only a fool would believe him at this point.
I highly doubt that space data centers will be more advantageous than terrestrial before 2035, and that’s very optimistic.
If it takes until 2035 or even 2045 for space data centers to have an economic advantage, it still seems like a good investment for a company like Google to be working on this.
And FWIW, I have heard quite a few people claiming that economically viable space data centers would "go against the laws of physics", etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
It's a multi-trillion dollar program, with Bezos/Musk involvement.
At best it’ll direct a lot of public funds into musk’s and trump’s pockets.
You should probably short UFO, SPCX, ASTS, RKLB, LMT, NOC, RTX etc.. if you believe that.
Let me know when Raytheon / BAE / Lockheed Martin / General Dynamics get in on it.
Negative on: Risk, cost, thermals, radiation, maintenance, latency, complexity, environmental.
The only win they have is making more outlandish shit to inflate value until it goes snap. One trick pony.
Even as some sort of failsafe compute for when some meteor hits the earth - already enough for a government to pay 10000x premium for it and it will bring in cash.
Obviously this is not intended to play in the same league as common enterprise datacenter.
No one is going to give a shit about compute if an asteroid hits us. If we survive it, it’ll turn into a resource war within weeks. We’ll be back to the Stone Age.
The only feasible thing I can see is jurisdiction related and that’s not something we should be encouraging. I mean we’ll just end up jamming data centres from the ground.