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| Image created with ChatGPT. |
Despite this article, I don't buy the logic of "orbital datacenters" as anything more than an investor boondoggle. The idea being that solar power is plentiful and cooling in the vacuum of space is super-cheap, which is true but not relevant. Solving the "operating AI in orbital conditions" problem is MUCH harder than "make AI models more energy-efficient on Earth" problem.
Computing systems operating in space have to be radiation-hardened and hyper-resilient, which means they operate on multiple-generations-out-of-date hardware (with known performance than can be defended from radiation) that's never upgraded. Making AI financially competitive on that platform is WAY harder than just energy-tuning a model on the ground.Yes, I know you can get a solid model like BERT to run on old K80 and M60 GPUs, which are nearly 20 years old. AWS still lets you rent GPUs that ancient for pretty cheap. But you'd be paying an absurd premium -- given launch costs -- for hardware of that vintage operating in space. Worse, that old iron would be operating at relatively high latency given it's *in orbit* and can't have a physical connection, and the hardware performance would decay every year, given nothing is 100% radiation-proof and servicing orbital hardware isn't worth it for anything that doesn't have humans or multi-billion-dollar irreplaceable telescope optics on board.
(Remember, one of the main reasons NASA reverted from the Space Shuttle to capsule-launch vehicles is no one needs a cargo bay that can retrieve items from orbit. It's literally cheaper to just let space junk burn up and build new on the ground, or build a spacecraft for independent reentry. Everything non-living in orbit is disposable or self-retrieving.)
Collectively, this makes the payback period on an orbital data center either untenably long (likely the hardware decays before it's paid off), or the premium on orbital computing resources is so stupidly high no one ever adopts it (decade-old high-latency GPUs that are multiple times more expensive than cutting-edge ground processors don't get rented).
Hot Take: We'll have profitable space hotels before we'll have profitable orbital AI datacenters -- because there's a defensible premium to be paid for letting people operate and recreate in orbit. High-performance computer processors? Not so much.
