They already have orbital, distributed, data centres.
It’s called Starlink. It’s already got the equivalent of entire cabinet worth of hardware.
Scott Manley has been doing the maths and shown how it’s already incredibly viable with current tech, especially with how they can already cool 20kw of Starlink sat just fine.
The biggest constraints on earth are town planning costs and delays/time, and of course power. (most DC cooling systems are closed looped)
Right, but that’s just for present compute capacity in the most optimistic scenario. Neglecting anything realistic, and the fact that starlink cooling isn’t actually sufficient (the sattelites have low power downtime to cool). On top of that the GPUs still die faster than the sattelites and you can’t just walk over and replace them in the rack. Let alone the end of ground-based astronomy or light pollution.
They already have orbital, distributed, data centres.
It’s called Starlink. It’s already got the equivalent of entire cabinet worth of hardware.
Scott Manley has been doing the maths and shown how it’s already incredibly viable with current tech, especially with how they can already cool 20kw of Starlink sat just fine.
The biggest constraints on earth are town planning costs and delays/time, and of course power. (most DC cooling systems are closed looped)
https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI
Starlink satellites carry antennae. That’s all they are. Not serious computational equipment.
Which is why Musk had proposed putting into orbit a million plus sats
Right, but that’s just for present compute capacity in the most optimistic scenario. Neglecting anything realistic, and the fact that starlink cooling isn’t actually sufficient (the sattelites have low power downtime to cool). On top of that the GPUs still die faster than the sattelites and you can’t just walk over and replace them in the rack. Let alone the end of ground-based astronomy or light pollution.