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"?
I've heard arguments that cooling will be a hard technical challenge and, given current equipment weights and launch costs, they would be uneconomical. But is there an obvious reason space data centers would be impossible?
Most technologies start out looking hard and economically infeasible. But if you invest in development, you might be able to get a few breakthroughs, and suddenly, it's viable.
If they do get things to work, 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 someone in Google's position.
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.
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
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.
Considering half the planet stops working when us-east-1 has a crappy day, no.
Also datacentre in space, even if it works, will have a statistical failure model. At the moment that failure model is based on throwing another one up there because fixing stuff is expensive and risky.
So I ask you what happens when your model starts hitting the tail end of the failure curve and can't launch more capacity because associated asteroid strike driven economic failure cripples your launch capacity.
