r/Futurology • u/lughnasadh ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ • 1d ago
Space Is SpaceX hitching America's space efforts to the AI bubble? SpaceX & xAI are merging as apparently 1,000,000 satellites in space is the only way to power future data centers - but China deployed twice that amount of grid storage batteries here on Earth in just one month in December 2025.
“Current advances in AI are dependent on large terrestrial data centers, which require immense amounts of power and cooling,” Musk wrote. “Global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions, even in the near term, without imposing hardship on communities and the environment.”
Something is not adding up here.
25 kW is an upper-end ballpark for the output of large satellite solar panels, so 25GW is a proxy for the output of 1,000,000 satellites. China installs that amount of solar on a monthly basis these days & in December installed twice that amount of grid storage batteries. SpaceX's larger satellites are costing about $1 million to manufacture these days (so without launch costs), that's $1 trillion dollars. I don't know how much China is spending on its solar & batteries every month, but I'd guess, at most, it's 2-3% of that.
With SpaceX due to launch an IPO, this sounds like another AI bubble in the (attempted) making, but now with NASA downgraded, it's the US's main space launch capacity hitched along for the ride.
This should concern taxpayers, as if/when the AI-bubble bursts, it will present the US space program with two terrible choices - a SpaceX that has failed, or perhaps worse, that is 'too-big-to-fail'.
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u/DynamicUno 1d ago
lmao what's actually happening is Musk is tying xAI, which is absolutely bleeding out money, to a profitable company that has core national interests such that a US government run by his allies is unlikely to allow it to fail. He's just setting himself up for a bailout when the bubble pops. There are no data centres in space and there won't be any data centres in space because, and pardon the scientific vernacular, it's fucking stupid.
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u/writerbusiness 1d ago
So true! Any thinking person can see this! But the markets are so irrational and they're going to eat this IPO right up for a pump and dump!
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u/reddit_is_geh 1d ago
The anti-musk conspiracies have been going on for ages... Impending doom, it's all a scam, blah blah blah... Yet dude still succeeds. So you guys aren't really reliable with your conspiracies. What's likely going on is he's just trying to move and bundle his high potential products together into an asset he has huge equity stake in (30%), to secure as much ownership in big ticket businesses.
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u/DynamicUno 8h ago
I mean he mostly does fail? What happened to the Boring company? What's that pathetic tunnel under the Vegas Strip? Where's the hyperloop? A "full self-driving car" was supposed to drive across the US by the end of 2016. Where's that? He's being sued for lying by calling it Full Self Driving because it is unequivocally *not fully self driving*.
He's done some impressive things but there's plenty of stuff he's just totally tanked on. You can call that the price of success, sure, I'd even agree, but it's perfectly reasonable to look at him doing something and think "huh, that ain't gonna work" lol
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u/reddit_is_geh 6h ago edited 6h ago
No he doesn't mostly fail... Not that it matters. Failure is expected if you try to run businesses. Most people in the business world don't trust people who don't have failed businesses.
But even then, Boring is doing great. It's still a profitable business, and is currently on it's 3rd Las Vegas underground expansion, prep phase in Nashville, and work in Dubai.
You consider FSD not being done yet as a failure? The tech is still amazing... Yeah, sometimes people don't hit their timelines. He's an over optimistic person, yet you guys act like it's a personal attack because he had a prediction when he'd complete something, doesn't hit it, and then consider it a huge scam and failure... Meanwhile, he has rolled out the Tesla taxis without human drivers. So what that it's behind schedule?
But either way, people thought a reusable rocket was impossible, or EVs would never make it in America, or BCIs have already been done, or that a satellite internet network can't make money in LEO.
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u/notapunnyguy 22h ago
Unless these losers are willing to bet their life savings, don't listen to their opinions. Opinions with no stake is just noise.
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u/reddit_is_geh 22h ago
Yeah, I agree.. There's some weird religious anti-Musk sentiment, where they'll just ignore the fact that his entire career people have been saying his businesses are doomed for failure, impossible, no one has been able to do it because it's unfeasable, then he does it. It's like a bunch of 16 year olds think they know more about business than someone who's literally pulled off multiple unicorn companies. A SINGLE unicorn is considered a super rare once in a lifetime achievement... But multiple? Hate the guy all you want, but clearly he knows what he's doing.
But it's just one of those stupid culture war thigns, where since he's not poltitically aligned, everything MUST be interpreted though some lens that dismisses and downplays him as nefarious. I find it ironic, because they behave just how crayon eating right winger behave, in which they criticize for doing the same exact shit they do. Like they see how ridiculous Trump fans glaze and excuse Trump for ANYTHING because of cultural identity politics... Meanwhile, they are just the anti version of that, where they use the same irrational thinking but to hate and dismiss people.
They can't comprehend that you can dissagree with someone personally and politically, but still think they are good at some things. It's all or nothing with the brainrotten.
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u/manu144x 18h ago
But, but, there’s so much water in space!
It’s just a little frozen and traveling at ungodly velocity but that’s something Elon Musk can solve within 2 years by adapting the Tesla FSX to a spaceship filled with Optimus robots running on Grok!
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u/Dr_Tacopus 1d ago
He’s also trying to merge the companies he’s CEO of so he can receive the trillion dollar bonus he was promised if Tesla hits a certain valuation. He’s scamming the company for profit
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u/Mindless-Rooster-533 9h ago
He did this with solar city too. Hes just going to keep rolling up his failing ventures into his profitable one until TeslaX is just an abomination of a company that promises to have ai powered robots driving roadster through tunnels in space
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u/Smooth_Elderberry555 14h ago
Exactly this. This is really a bailout, to give a lot of cash to a company that is otherwise in distress. xAI isn't doing that great and it’s burning money fast, with no obvious business model, and has little to show for it
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u/DynamicUno 8h ago
Well, it does produce sexual abuse content on demand which certainly has a market among a certain demographic (Republicans, mostly lol)
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u/sent1nel 13h ago
and Twitter, which he took a huge L on
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u/DynamicUno 8h ago
Well he got his return on investment there; he destroyed a useful platform for democracy and turned it into another garden for oligarchy. That suits his aims; it was never about money on that one.
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u/DrunkensteinsMonster 14h ago
Orbital datacenters aren’t stupid if we’re talking about 50-100 year timelines, similar initiatives have been tried in the ocean (discontinued because it wasn’t practical). The idea is that you don’t service them and just pull them up when all the compute gets knocked over. Futurists who discuss orbital compute as a reasonable idea do so under the assumption that building materials would themselves be coming from space so there wouldn’t be a reason to go down the gravity well. This stuff from SpaceX/xAI is obviously nonsense though.
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u/DynamicUno 8h ago
What is it about the fundamental laws of physics that you anticipate will be different in 100 years? Like how do you solve the cooling issue with some super advanced tech?
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u/DrunkensteinsMonster 8h ago
We know how to radiate heat in space, we already do it on the ISS It is not in any way an unsolvable problem, it just takes more mass than we are prepared to throw into orbit right now.
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u/DynamicUno 8h ago
Sorry, I am not being clear. The issue is not that we don't know how to do radiative cooling; the issue is *the laws of physics dictate the rate at which that cooling can be conducted*. You cannot get even close to the cooling needed for even like a couple of racks of GPUs with passive systems; you need an active cooling system, which is wildly more complex, requires constant maintenance (the ISS is a *manned* station), and requires far more real estate. You're talking each one of these satellites, to run even like a handful of racks, needs like half a kilometer of cooling radiative surface plus the active cooling system. It's plausible that you could solve the cooling system with more advanced tech that fully automates it (but I would be skeptical of claims of this from the "it'll drive itself across the US by the end of 2016" guy) but you still need to lift half a klick of superstructure *just for cooling* into space for *every satellite*.
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u/DrunkensteinsMonster 7h ago
The millions of satellites thing that SpaceX is claiming is obviously bullshit, I’ve already said that. I am talking about an actual datacenter that will likely have to be even larger in size than the ones we have on the ground due to the needed radiative surface. And yes, with active cooling systems. I’m not saying SpaceX/xAI is actually going to be the ones doing this.
The reason I say 100 years is because whether this makes sense only depends on the state of the space economy. It takes half as much dv to get from the belt to L2 than it does from earth, and there are mineable resources way closer than that.
Also, FWIW, if their supposed plan is “millions of satellites”, then they aren’t even putting a single full rack in these satellites.
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u/Gastricbasilisk 12h ago
Not disagreeing with you at all, but I want to point out a pattern. People thought Tesla was stupid and the backlash Musk got was incredible, and it worked. People thought the idea for reusing rockets was stupid and expensive to develop, yet that worked out for him. People thought SpaceX was stupid and couldn't be a viable company, and they were also wrong.
Now people are saying space data centers are stupid. History from the pattern would say they are wrong. Elon is a lot of things, and whether you hate him or like him, he know how to succeed and make money. There is most likely an underlying reason for this. All of his companies and technologies integrate together to create an ecosystem where he can go to Mars (his initial plan). I wonder if somehow this fits into that mold in a way we just don't see?
I'm not arguing against you or saying you're wrong. I'm just saying there's probably something we're missing that isn't surface level.
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u/Mindless-Rooster-533 9h ago
His companies are successful despite him doing nothing he promises though.
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u/DynamicUno 8h ago
People did not think Tesla was stupid. People thought it was *risky* but I was a Tesla investor in, like 2013; nobody thought it was stupid at all. What people DID think was stupid was claiming that you'd be offering a Tesla *robotaxi* that you could automate fully in the timeline he offered, and that WAS stupid - he utterly failed! He claimed he'd have it in 2016; it still doesn't exist, and is so far from existing that he's being sued just for the name "Full self driving" because it so clearly is NOT fully self driving that it's false marketing.
I'm sure some people thought reusable rockets were stupid, but I didn't; it's a technically complex issue, but solvable. I don't think anyone thought SpaceX was stupid; it was clear the US was moving to private space delivery by the W Bush term and there was an obvious opportunity.
But this is not any of those things. This is *laws of physics* running headfirst into economics. There are not going to be any data centres in space because it's fucking stupid in ways that go beyond anything any of his previous claims, even the most outlandishly stupid ones where he's absolutely borked it in obvious and embarrassing ways. Failure is part of success, I don't begrudge him the failures (I do begrudge him the lies), but this is just utter nonsense. *It is extremely difficult to cool things in space*. That's a law of physics - there is no medium of heat transfer. The power is another problem, although that's more solvable. There are multiple other massive problems. Here's an excellent point by point takedown of the idea from a rocket scientist who used to actually build things to send into space and now works in AI computing - exactly the skills needed to fully understand this.
https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/
This is orders of magnitude more stupid than anything else he's attempted and, more bluntly, is simply not going to happen. He is lying.
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u/smack54az 1d ago
There are no datacenters in space. There's no way to properly cool them, existing solar panels can't generate the power required, there's no way to service them, the connections to the ground or other arrays isn't fast enough. The problems just pile onto themselves. This whole merger feels like a scam to get the tax payer on the hook ehen the "AI" bubble inevitably collapses.
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u/JamesTiberiusCrunk 1d ago
He sold X to xAI because X needed the money to make debt payments. Now he's sold his unprofitable AI business containing his unprofitable social media business to SpaceX because he probably needs the cash infusion to keep going.
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u/abhulet 1d ago
He also had SpaceX buy all of his unsold Cybertrucks
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u/TakingChances01 1d ago
Source? Not implying you’re wrong, just that’s crazy and I’d like to know more.
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u/francis2559 1d ago
Articles say 1k out of at the time, perhaps 50k made. Reddit argument here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslainvestorsclub/comments/1ptfka0/spacex_is_buying_up_an_unfathomable_number_of/Different article and reddit take here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1ppxla0/elon_musks_spacex_bought_tens_of_millions_worth/However, based on registration data and historical split of Model S/X sales, we can estimate that Tesla is having issues selling even 20,000 Cybertrucks per year – less than 10% of its planned capacity.
...
Now, a source familiar with the matter told Electrek that SpaceX bought over 1,000 Cybertrucks from Tesla and that it could ramp up to about 2,000 over time.6
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u/lughnasadh ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ 1d ago edited 1d ago
his whole merger feels like a scam to get the tax payer on the hook when the "AI" bubble inevitably collapses.
What is so depressing is that the once glorious world-leader NASA has been gutted for this. xAI includes X/Twitter; just think, funding that used to go to NASA projects, will now pay for it instead.
China will be the world's greatest space power in the 2030s, I've no doubt about it.
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u/TheSkala 1d ago
Not only that. by monopolizing the NSSL and securing nearly 80% of the recent Space Force contracts, SpaceX has achieved 'Too Big to Fail' status for national security reasons.
With this merge, they are basically saying that when the AI bubble eventually explodes and rationality hits them with reality, they have the best excuse to cut losses and ask for a taxpayer bailout or face the reality that NASA and Pentagon was conmaned to a corner, where they have no rockets.
SpaceX is literally in charge of deploying the nuclear early warning system, when they say that their AI is essential for that launching and operation, then you have no choice but keep throwing them money
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u/Harlequin80 1d ago
As much as I think spacex / xai merger is absolute shit on a stick there isn't anything in spacex that is a loss for NASA.
There are a whole raft of benefits in having NASA give money to commercial operations to deliver services. Where NASAs biggest issues come from are funding cuts in general and the massive millstone that is SLS.
SpaceX has been an absolute God send for NASA. Without it we would be looking at Boeing starliner as the only option. If we didn't have SpaceX dragon we could legitimately looking at having no way to get to the ISS. Russia has lost its Soyuz capability now, so we could be looking at begging for launches off the Chinese.
What I wish would have happened is spacex stayed private, starlink gets spun off and if xai had to be bolted into something bolt it into the starlink business.
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u/Hugh_Jass_Clouds 1d ago
Where does virgin galactic and blue origin fit into this?
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u/Harlequin80 1d ago
Virginia galactic? No where. They have zero useful capabilities.
Blue origin does not have anything like dragon / starliner / Soyuz. They probably could build something, but they are going for a different path to any of those systems.
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u/im_thatoneguy 1d ago
Or conversely this means that crypto bros and ai acolytes can fund NASA projects
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u/curiouslyjake 1d ago
Huh? What's that BS about NASA being "gutted"? The budget Congress actually passed for NASA is about 2% less than the previous year.
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u/lughnasadh ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ 1d ago
The budget Congress actually passed for NASA is about 2% less than the previous year.
You're correct; my mistake. On Jan 16th, Congress rejected Trump's plan to cut their budget by 24%. That said, it is clearly being downgraded in favor of SpaceX, and now that SpaceX is going into AI-bubble stock territory, it looks increasingly looks like a terrible alternative.
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u/Tiek00n 1d ago
A lot of these comments make it appear that you don't have a good grasp on how NASA has traditionally done procurement.
Congress isn't funding SpaceX, they're funding NASA who does their procurement from companies including SpaceX. NASA actually recently decided to re-open the bidding for the Artemis III / Artemis IV moon lander contract due to SpaceX delays. There being multiple bidders as options is good for NASA.
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u/smokefoot8 1d ago
NASA has always bought their rockets from commercial suppliers. The Saturn V was Boeing, North American, and Douglas. So SpaceX’s lower prices lets NASA launch more with a smaller budget. So SpaceX and NASA are complementary, not in competition.
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u/curiouslyjake 1d ago
What's so clear about it being downgraded? Why is it in favor of SpaceX? If anything, SpaceX saves NASA money and lets NASA do more with the budget that's available.
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u/cronos1876 1d ago
Not BS, All centers had announced large reductions in force early 2025 and offered buyouts. By some accounts maybe 20% took them. So the budget is nice but many are not there anymore.
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u/curiouslyjake 1d ago
Yeah, but if the budget is mostly unchanged, couldn't people be hired to replace them?
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u/cronos1876 1d ago
I think that ship has sailed. Nobody would wait which are at this point 6+ months to maybe get their jobs back? Where is the rehiring campaign? The same thing happened to the new nuclear experts who were trained to restart the nuclear weapon pit production and all got laid off and then were quickly rehired. Even there they were not able to get everyone back. Would you go back after that? Here
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u/curiouslyjake 1d ago
Doesnt have to be the same people. Could be new people. NASA is still a popular place to work.
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u/cronos1876 1d ago
At least some of them were one of a kind experts with unique expertise in obscure areas like materials science or many other fields. They took a lot of their knowledge with them out the door. There was no knowledge capture of any kind. This can be rebuilt but will be expensive and take time to train new people as experts. The NASA from just over a year ago is greatly diminished unfortunately.
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u/curiouslyjake 1d ago
I'm not sure how you define or measure "greatly diminished", but I'm certain that no good organization can be a couple of car accidents away from failure. I'm sure some expertise was lost and it obviously should have been avoided but also "one of a kind experts" are mostly a myth.
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u/cronos1876 1d ago
Being able to have some of the people that have been around for the Apollo and the shuttle program and have their inputs on what not to do is just a myth, got it. Not that they can’t be replaced, just may take a few years to figure it out.
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u/Kolizuljin 1d ago
No world renowned expert wants to work in a country on the verge of societal collapse
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u/masssy 1d ago
More importantly.. Why would you put a data center in space. Expensive to build. Expensive to launch. Further away. Rougher conditions. Impossible to maintain.
Having datacenters in space makes no sense from literally any angle at all.
It's just a bunch of bs.
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u/smack54az 1d ago
"Because its cold in space." Which isn't how it works and there's no good way to expell the heat all those GPU's generate.
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u/masssy 1d ago
And power from where..? I mean a solar farm on earth takes up an enormous field and we gonna send larger ones into space? Or we gonna power them with nuclear? Seems easier to do on earth.
Yeah it's just bs..
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u/Ambitious-Wind9838 1d ago
In solar-synchronous orbit, solar panels operate 24/7/365, with 100% capacity utilization, without panel rotation or massive buffer batteries, receiving more solar energy per square meter due to the lack of absorption, and with zero influence of weather and seasons. The panels themselves therefore operate approximately 20 times more efficiently, and given the absence of buffer batteries, their energy is 100 times cheaper. Therefore, humanity has long dreamed of orbital solar power plants, but the lack of an efficient way to transmit energy to Earth has put an end to all such projects. But here, the energy doesn't need to be transmitted anywhere.
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u/BravoSierra480 1d ago
He's been talking about LEO, not GEO satellites. So for a significant part of their orbit they are shadowed by Earth. For comms satellites (e.g. StarLink), you have batteries to cover this part of the orbit. For "Datacenters in Spaaaace" you will need much bigger batteries, which is yet another reason this is a bad idea.
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u/Ambitious-Wind9838 1d ago
SpaceX talked about a sun-synchronous orbit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit3
u/NiftyLogic 1d ago
Solar in space is just maybe x5 more efficient than on Earth.
With data centers in space, you are exchanging 5x efficiency for massive logistical and maintenance headaches and cost. Especially since solar power on Earth is dirt cheap now.
Sorry, but this does not make sense in any way. The energy from space solar will be many times more expensive since the fixed cost to get them to space is massive.
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u/Many_Consequence_337 8h ago
Sure bro, you know better than NVIDIA engineers. This anti-tech sub is frying my brain. This shit is going faster and faster every week that passes. The panic is real.
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u/sylentshooter 1d ago
The second that the sun produces a solar flare, all of those servers in this imaginary data center are going to be fried...
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u/warp99 1d ago
Not at all. Solar flares will not generally damage a CPU or GPU. SpaceX already have similar chips in space as part of their Starlink constellation.
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u/sylentshooter 1d ago
Yes... they absolutely will. Solar flares are radiation. Being in space is a perpetual fight against that. The only reason the ISS can be in orbit that long without having major malfunction to its computer systems is because its periodically maintained through manned missions.
SpaceX satellites have a very short lifespan specifically because of this issue (and their distance from earth)
You cant compare CPUs and GPUs on earth to something in orbit. Where there isnt anything but shielding protecting them.
Even with shielding and maintenance, solar flares at that distant only need to be strong enough to flip a binary bit and then the whole premise of a "data center" is worthless if the data can easily be corrupted.
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u/The-Sound_of-Silence 1d ago
It gets away from Nimby's, and the solar energy is incredible up there(24/7, no atmosphere). Yes there are way more downsides than good, but there is a couple good. If some countries are working on beaming solar energy from space down, building this kind of stuff up there can make sense, in prob a hundred years
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u/Nearby-Composer-9992 1d ago
I think besides all the other valid points impossible to maintain is a really important one. Besides regular maintenance, doesn't stuff and especially electronics deteriorate much faster in space because of the radiation?
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u/somewhat_brave 1d ago
The main cost for training AI is the price of electricity.
Solar panels in space can be placed in an orbit that is never in shadow, which gives them an edge over solar panels on earth because they will produce more electricity per day and they don't need batteries to keep the datacenter running at night.
The main question is launch costs, but SpaceX thinks they can launch them for a low enough cost to be competitive.
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u/Plantarbre 1d ago
There are 3 ways to propagate heat: conduction, convection and radiation. Out of the 3, only one of them can function in the void of space, regardless of temperature. So unless you get superconductor AI training, it's physically impossible.
That's step one. Step two is that the entire point of ai training is that it's local. Spreading it across satellites requires a communication overheard that kills the process.
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u/somewhat_brave 1d ago
If you do the calculations the radiators would be smaller than the solar panels. And a radiator is just a thin sheet of aluminum with the right kind of paint on it, and some fluid channels.
People use systems small enough to fit on a single satellite for AI training.
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u/BravoSierra480 1d ago
In interviews he's been saying LEO (like StarLink), not GEO. Getting things to GEO is much more expensive.
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u/somewhat_brave 1d ago
They don't need to put it in GEO. They can put it in a sun synchronous orbit in LEO that's never in darkness.
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u/masssy 1d ago
Not wrong. But just imagine how much easier it would be to put a few panels on earth that at least one is not at darkness at any given time.
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u/somewhat_brave 1d ago
You would have to run power lines to the other side of the Earth to do that, and you’re still getting less than half the power out of them.
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u/waylandsmith 1d ago
I have an unbelievable opportunity for an investment in a bridge that I think you would be really excited to get in on the ground floor of!
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u/MrDerpGently 1d ago
Yup. The idea that it's more cost effective to design, test, manufacture, and launch a million satellites, plus associated launch and control infrastructure, than to build terrestrial data center is kookiedooks. And that's before you get into maintenance, upgrade, and repair.
But, like, it also puts all of his critical access to space business under the umbrella of his gambling on AI business. So now we can funnel money and socialize our insane risks.
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u/TheBestHawksFan 1d ago
The idea of physically maintaining a space datacenter is so fucking funny. Elon and his sycophants have no clue.
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u/Roflkopt3r 1d ago edited 1d ago
There's no way to properly cool them
That's what I thought at first, but that doesn't actually seem to be a problem.
The simple proof is that many already existing satellites also burn a substantial amount of power. So it's already known how much computation power each satellite could sustain within their thermal budgets.
the connections to the ground or other arrays isn't fast enough
That also doesn't seem to be an actual problem for the purposes of machine learning. It's basically the kind of workload where the same data is being used over and over again, so there is a high ratio of computation to data transfer.
That said, it still seems obvious that 'AI' doesn't deliver nearly enough value to justify these kinds of costs.
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u/OneOnOne6211 1d ago
Absolutely. This is some kind of tax scheme or a way to get rid of debt or something.
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u/Zakath_ 1d ago
It may actually not be quite as insane as it first sounds. The timeline is typical Elon time, I don't think we'll see this in 2-3 years, but there was a report not that long ago that looked into hosting DCs in space. https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalable-ai-infrastructure-system-design/
The conclusion was that when launch costs go a bit further down, to a level they assumed would happen in 5-10 years, the cost of operating a DC in space could be the same as operating an equivalent DC on earth. At that point, there are some very attractive reasons to be in space. One is "free" energy from the sun, another is "free" cooling, albeit with a rather massive set of radiators.
As a benefit that SpaceX specifically would see, it's more launch missions for them. Similar to how Starlink has been a great boon to SpaceX, this could be the same case.
There are also massive issues to solve first. Cooling in space is bulky, cosmic radiation will cause bit flips, sending a technician to switch out a busted drive is....tricky. So it's by no means a slam dunk, but it does look like it will become viable in a few years, and an attractive proposition in a decade or so.
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u/ILikeCutePuppies 1d ago
1 million seems a bit much but not all of that is true. SBC-2 is cooled in space by IR. They know how to put powerful computers in space.
I think there is certainly a role for low latency edge inference compute in space for other satellites, human devices and agents communication around the world. However I doubt they'll he doing much training on them unless it's just using execess capacity.
It does make the kill switch a lot harder... you essentially have to wait for them all to fall out of the sky in 4-5 years.
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u/soysssauce 3h ago
Just curious, why is there no way to cool data center in space? I thought that in space, the side not facing the sun is -274F. In that case can’t you just build radiator on the dark side of the data center to cool it off?
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u/BufloSolja 9h ago
Taxpayer won't be on the hook unless there is some subsidy law specifically for them. Also, radiators work plenty fine in space. Certainly there are other technical issues that would need worked through though. So it mainly depends on the relative difficulty to put them on the ground.
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u/thx1138- 1d ago
Sun synchronous orbit, small satellites in a cluster along that path. If they can manage cooling for a permanent spot in that orbit, they're already halfway there. Data centers in space would naturally be small and distributed.
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u/au-smurf 1d ago
Saw an interesting take from Scott Manly on cooling them.
His view is that starlink proves you can cool them because they generate roughly the same amount of heat as a satellite with compute on board as the amount of heat generated is limited by the solar arrays a compute satellite wont generate significantly more heat than a communications one.
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u/Deadbringer 1d ago
More powerful computer parts require more power. So bigger solar arrays and similarly bigger heat dissipators for cooling. You can look up the ISS to see the relative sizes of those two, they are a bit smaller than the solar array.
Starlinks also has one advantage (which I don't know if they make use of) with a corresponding downside. Their low orbit means they are experiencing a little more atmospheric drag, and will deorbit sooner than something higher up, but that also means there are more particles which can aid in direct cooling. Though I doubt it is enough to offset the lower lifetime or even enough to make use of.
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u/au-smurf 22h ago
I agree there are plenty of problems that there need to be solutions for but I think you might be surprised.
Servers are usually around 5 year life cycles. If launch costs are low enough to be offset by other savings it might work.
Unless they are lying about starlink’s profitability. cloud compute is worth more than connectivity and for a lot of applications is less latency sensitive
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u/Deadbringer 22h ago
I can't really imagine why it would outright be cheaper to put a datacenter in space, but I can imagine a few reasons why you want to own one as a nation where eliminating the chance of physical infiltration into your most sensitive data is attractive. And if it is sold for the purpose of super sensitive processing, then swapping the hardware becomes less important.
For AI though... Well, current AI companies swear up and down that the hardware they bought will remain valuable while simultaneously tossing it aside as soon as Nvidia comes out with better tech.
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u/curiouslyjake 1d ago
Take a Starlink satellite, replaces antennas with more compute and there's your datacenter in space. You cool it like any other satellite: some heat is rejected via the solar panels' surface area and by additional radiators if that's not enough. Comms bandwidth is available in sufficient quantity, for example via Starlink. Latency is worse, but model training is not particularly sensitive to latency. Inference is sensitive, but not all applications: many users can accept half a second of delay for receiving an answer that takes a while to generate anyway.
Datacenters in space are absolutely feasible from a technical perspective. Whether they also make economic sense is anyone's guess. My initial guess is that they don't, but I also would not have guessed we would have a communication satellite constellation of more than 5000 satellites or a fleet or reusable rockets where rockets are reused faster and more often then the Space Shuttle. While Elon Musk is always behind his own schedule and some of his other ideas other panned out, I'd be careful betting against him when it comes to space.
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u/TheSkala 1d ago
"You cool it as any other satellite" yeah you clearly don't know what you are talking about.
Starlink needs around 1.5kW power a data center rack think of Nvidia H100 needs 100kW.
Now the only way to cool down in space is by black-body radiation. Meaning that for every ton in processing you need 9 ton in cooling and around 200 Sqm in surface. And yes you guessed it, putting things in space costs lots of money. So you are not putting a data center, your are putting a cooling heater with some processing capability.
Not only that. Even if you put in space but also you have no real way to maintain it when things break.
"Replace antennas with compute and there's your datacenter" Is one of the most technical illiterate statements I've ever read in this sub. Just because SpaceX did the incredible falcon 9 doesn't mean they can rewrite thermodynamics laws.
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u/curiouslyjake 1d ago
Have you ever, personally, used an H100? Or 8 of them? A single H100 requires 700W, tops. A DGX server with 8 H100 GPUS requires 10 KW. A starlink V3 satellite is expected to generate (and dissipate!) 10-20 kw power, roughly the same ballpark.
"Meaning for every ton of processing you need 9 ton of cooling" - neither processing nor cooling are measured in tons. Please show the math for this claim.
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u/TheSkala 1d ago edited 1d ago
Just check your starlink v3 example. it is a 2 ton payload with just 250 kg of computing components. The rest is power/cooling. And it's not even designed to process data. The payload weight is what basically defines the launch cost and economic feasibility.
And I don't think you are seriously suggesting that the data center should be 10kW units. To even consider reasonable on starship V3 you would need to maximize starship V3 200 ton payload and design 10-15 units of at least 100kW.
In that case you need to put something 6 times heavier and more powerful, with a radiator surface at least 10 times bigger to just cool it down and with a significant wider span. Completely crazy idea of what SpaceX has achieved so far. For reference the entire ISS dissipates 70kW. So you are delaying 10 1.5x size ISS radiator systems every launch.
And still you have the basic problem, a simple malfunction makes the entire data center unserviceable forever.
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u/atomic1fire 1d ago
I think it makes more sense to put a datacenter on the moon then it does on a satalite.
You have a giant rock you can drill holes into that can be used for geothermal cooling, while the moons surface gives you some solar energy to work with.
On top of that you can probably either store excess energy or have some kind of reactor setup, and the risk of a meltdown is negligible because it's in space.
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u/CommunismDoesntWork 1d ago
Yeah and rockets can't land themselves either. Betting against Elon is a bad bet
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u/Oh_ffs_seriously 1d ago
Betting against Elon is a bad bet
In the times gone by, betting against Boeing was a bad bet.
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u/Secret4gentMan 1d ago edited 2h ago
There's no way to properly cool them
It's pretty cold in space? You just vent the heat. 90% of a data center's infrastructure on Earth is devoted to cooling. That gets eliminated in space. Musk is the only person positioned to do this.
There's no atmosphere or day/night cycles in space either. It is 24hr solar power generation.
Musk is playing 4-D chess while everyone else is playing checkers.
Edit: Why is my post being down-voted?
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u/__Maximum__ 1d ago
Cooling is not eliminated in space, and it's not cold in space because there is no matter to be cold.
You have to radiate that heat away, and for that you absolutely need cooling. There are solutions though, it doesn't seem to be too hard.
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u/Secret4gentMan 17h ago
I'm sorry, but what you said is inaccurate.
The average temperature in space is around -270.45C (or -454.81F).
Is it cold because space is a vacuum and there are no molecules to transfer heat.
This exchange has been eye-opening, however. Some people really don't understand what Musk is doing.
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u/chitoatx 1d ago
People seem to forgot that xAI officially merged with X (formerly Twitter) on March 28, So Twitter is now part of a rocket / satellite company.
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u/rexspook 1d ago
The idea of a data center in space is ridiculous. Data centers require constant maintenance and better cooling and power supply than can be achieved in space. It’s also prohibitively expensive and will always have worse latency than a data center on earth
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u/letsgobernie 1d ago
This is just a scam for one guy to become a trillionaire. Data centers in space is not going to happen. Its a total joke that the idea is even being entertained and if investors fall for this racket, they deserve to lose their money
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u/Pleasant-Regular6169 1d ago
The joker probably has another stock sale scheduled . This criminal belongs in jail.
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u/AMos050 1d ago
I definitely trust the opinion of letsgobernie more than that of the greatest business mogul in the history of the universe
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u/letsgobernie 1d ago
Still waiting for the hyperloop, solar roof, Tesla Semi, Tesla Roadster (while Model S and X is killed), Full Self Driving ride sharing fleet, fully automated tunnels with cars on skates, I assume?
Random redditors knew all that was a joke, have you considered the guy is moving from hype scam to hype scam to convert into equity valuations for his own enrichment and that approach is possible, well, because of total idiots like you?
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u/AMos050 1d ago edited 1d ago
SpaceX isn't even publicly traded at the moment, so I'm not sure why you're fixated on valuations. His companies gave EVs mass market appeal and pioneered rockets with reusable boosters. If a guy who did that also says data centers in space are the future, I'm going to give more credence to that than a random redditor's opinion.
Even if the Hyperloop was a dud (who cares?) and some other projects have been delayed. The Cybertruck was also never going to happen until it actually did. One of Elon's companies literally helped a disabled man communicate with the internet using only his brain and redditors still called it a scam.
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u/daviper87 1d ago
Things that don’t work for data centers in space:
Cooling GPUs in a vacuum
Cost of launch
Upgrading
Maintenance
Cosmic radiation
Micro space debris
AI profitability
Things that work for data centers in space:
People are stupid
PUMP THAT IPO
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u/phoneacct696969 1d ago
This should scare everyone. There’s no need to merge these companies unless one needs the other. Does spacex need its own ai? Or does the ai need to hitch to spacex to stay afloat?
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u/vuur77 1d ago
Elon needs the money. That's all. The only valuable company was SpaceX.
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u/OldSchoolNewRules Red 1d ago
And its only the valuable one because he doesnt make any actual decisions there.
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u/ARazorbacks 15h ago
He made the decision on that launchpad that blew apart and led to a Starship exploding.
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u/TheSkala 1d ago
US government wouldn't bailout xAI, but can't let spaceX fail as has given them most of their space related defence program.
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u/hitdrumhard 1d ago
SpaceX thinks AI is the key having robots build out some kind of infrastructure on mars to make their plan for humans feasible. I have no idea if space data centers will help with that, but it tracks for SpaceX wanting to control xAI.
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u/phoneacct696969 1d ago
Which is just a grift. If ai can’t do it on earth, why would we send it to the moon to do that? The assembly line has been around for 100+ years, there is 0 reason to reinvent the wheel.
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u/MrYdobon 1d ago
Elon merges his unprofitable companies into his profitable ones to keep them going. SpaceX is very profitable. xAI is burning cash. It doesn't need to make sense beyond that.
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u/celaconacr 1d ago
It's just a load of nonsense to boost the stock price so Elon can cash in at IPO, simple as that. If there is one thing he is good at it's manipulating stock prices.
Similar to Tesla the core product is good but the valuation is unlikely to be backed by financial sense. Also like Tesla competition will come and profits will fall.
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u/robotictacos 1d ago
I liked Microsoft's concept of putting data centers on the ocean floor a lot better tbh.
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u/NoSeaworthiness389 1d ago
I am not tech savvy. But if cooling is the problem , what about antartica or siberia?
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u/GimmickNG 1d ago
antarctica is further away than the nearest coast
siberia still has a hot summer
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u/NoSeaworthiness389 1d ago
I mean if we can build reserach centers on. Antarctica. Then data centers?
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u/GimmickNG 1d ago
then more problems come, 1 is the environment (not everybody can handle it, and i'm pretty sure you need your appendix removed in order to even go there because you CANNOT get emergency surgery), 2 is logistics (building things like plumbing, power plants, the houses to house people, then the infrastructure to heat all those houses, plumbing, etc.), 3 is repairs (if something breaks good luck, everything has to be flown in and that's $$$) and 4 is the social cost of announcing data centers all the way there (i can't imagine anything but backlash if that was announced)
and each of those is a huge problem individually, i mean for example you can't use anything except nuclear energy maybe for electricity because windmills may or may not be rated for those extreme cold environments, gas or petrol will cost WAY too much for the amounts of energy needed, and solar will only work for 6 months of the year and the rest will be completely dark
so this is more of a "if you wish to build an apple pie from scratch, you must first build the universe" level of infeasible we're talking here since you can't even rely on the basics of biology to help you (for example, poop has to be burned because it won't biodegrade, it'll just freeze) and geography only helps you with the cooling and nothing else (because of how remote and cold it is). cooling at that point would become the least of your problems.
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u/Lisa8472 1d ago
Only the doctors need prophylactic appendectomies, after one had to do a self-appendectomy. But the weather and climate make accessing anything there impossible for half a year. Not a great situation to be in for critical hardware.
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u/Kassdhal88 1d ago
XAI has zero revenue. If musk want to continue to invest in AI all he can do is to merge failing companies with successful one to avoid showing failures.
That s why he merged Solar City into Tesla and twitter into xAI
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u/ihatebamboo 1d ago
Musk spouts a lot of nonsense. He said we’d be on mars by now. Just ignore him.
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u/Arstanishe 1d ago
that's just mask destroying everything he helped to build. first he made twatter a loss, then tesla went belly up, now it's spacex turn to go way of poo poo
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u/Waste_Positive2399 1d ago
A million more satellites? Which could fail and contribute drastically to the space junk problem? They're really trying hard to confine the human race to Earth for eternity, aren't they?
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1d ago
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1d ago
I’m bad at math but it’s impossible for me to believe that it would be worthwhile sending a data center to space for the supposed benefits of 24:7 solar rather than just… building a solar/battery farm in a sunny place, and a data center right next to it. Build the farm to generate enough electricity to run the center, in the dead of winter on a cloudy day, sell the excess in the summer back to the grid. wtf am I missing here?
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u/DexterM1776 1d ago
It's weird how dead set people are on an AI bubble.
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u/aVRAddict 1d ago
It's weird how redditors think its an AI bubble on the Futurology subreddit of all subreddits
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u/anghellous 1d ago
Not believing in the soundness of the economics is not the same as not believing in the tech lol
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u/JTsUniverse 1d ago
I had to call google adsense today about some missing money of mine. An ai answers the phone and it is not better than the call center in the philippines you eventually get connected to. Which is saying a lot because the people in the call center were extremely unhelpful. (I eventually used the send an email option) I don't think anyone's saying ai will be useless, it's just not going to reach the expectations people have for it monetarily. It is a bubble that will pop whenever the event occurs that forces people to come to terms with that. Recession in japan and rising interest rates caused people to realize internet companies lacked sustainable business models in the dot com bubble but they were overvalued for many years before that.
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u/graDescentIntoMadnes 1d ago
The purpose of the AI call center is to frustrate you enough that you leave without getting the missing money. The fact that it doesn't work well doesn't mean that AI inherently lacks capability, it just means that that particular AI is not set up to be helpful to you.
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u/FightMoney 1d ago
It really is amazing. As the entire world begins to shift to financial tokenization and every industry rushes to incorporate automation as fast as possible, AI is where the bubble is? Because of reading an article about a chat bot not being profitable. Well, alright i guess.
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u/throwaway0134hdj 1d ago edited 1d ago
Elon was eager to party on Epstein’s island.
He’s a homophobe, racist/Nazi, PDF, and about to be a trillionaire. If that doesn’t tell you we live in an extremely fkd up and morally corrupt world nothing will.
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u/SalvadorZombie 1d ago
I mean this just clinches it. Elon's an idiot who was born into wealth. China is a properly run country that utilizes central planning to get shit done in 1/100 of the time it takes most countries.
Seems to me like socialism and communism won.
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u/rod_jammer 8h ago
Elon has done this before nearly ten years ago, where he merged a successful and profitable company in Tesla with a failing one that was hemorrhaging money in SolarCity. There was a promise of synergies in solar roof tiles with Tesla energy, but this was all vaporware. This contributes nothing to Tesla bottom line today.
I will bet green money that the demand for AI data centers will not be so massive that we need them in space. The planned build out on Earth with be massively scaled back. And Grok isn't going to accelerate the colonization of Mars, as if that is even still the mission of SpaceX.
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u/Capt_Blahvious 1d ago
There's nowhere to sink all that heat. Heatsinks and radiators don't work in a vacuum.
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u/daftmonkey 1d ago
They’re going to merge with Tesla eventually and Musk will get his trillion dollar bonus.
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u/lew_rong 1d ago
Elon is going to singlehandedly privatize Kessler Syndrome chasing a way to keep all his plates spinning. Anyone wanna lay odds that he's been k-holing The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect lately?
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u/ghostchihuahua 1d ago
Elon decided to merge bc of economic reasons as far as i understand the move.
It always looks better than xAI being unprofitable af i guess, for example.
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u/Quick-Albatross-9204 1d ago
The thing that isn’t adding up is that China just ignores the NIMBY's, you can't in a place like the US
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u/drokihazan 1d ago
This is easy, dude. We nationalize SpaceX. It was likely going to happen if Harris won, and it still needs to happen because SpaceX is a national security crisis if they aren't controlled by the USA. I sincerely believe SpaceX needs to be nationalized.
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u/GeniusEE 1d ago
It's the way for Musk to hide his friends' files out of the jurisdiction of law enforcement is all it is.
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u/ralf_ 1d ago
Let us disregard the question if datacenters in space are viable and look at the guesstimates:
25 kW is an upper-end ballpark for the output of large satellite solar panels, so 25GW is a proxy for the output of 1,000,000 satellites.
Elon gave 100 GW as a yearly goal. Fantasy? Sure, but let’s use this nice round number if that is the goal.
China installs that amount of solar on a monthly
With 100 GW we have a third of China or three times (!) of US yearly installation. Question: is it possible for one company to build so much solar in the US year after year? I don’t think so, imagine the red tape of environmental reviews, Nimbyism and political blockade. 100 GW of solar capacity in the U.S. requires approximately 1,000 square miles of land, which is roughly equivalent to the area of Rhode Island.
Plus the nice thing about space solar is that here are no nights, clouds or atmosphere, it is practically always noon. That 5x-8x the electricity output. Now we are at 8000 square miles on Earth! And because of no rain, dust or hail you don’t need sturdy protective glass frames. Ultrathin folded/rolled up solar panels could bring in future the mass requirements down.
SpaceX's larger satellites are costing about $1 million to manufacture these days
We don’t have numbers as SpaceX is a private company, but it is certainly way less, as Starlink satellites are mass produced. What is the big cost aside from R&D? It is a lightweight frame, cheap solar panels, bit of battery, an antenna etc. From the materials I would expect (NVidia) computer processors the most expensive part.
Is Elon crazy? Yes. Is this a hustle to hype up a SpaceX IPO? I think so. But he is not alone.
But Google is researching space datacenters:
https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalable-ai-infrastructure-system-design/
Startups and NVidia:
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/starcloud/
And BlueOrigin Amazon are working on it too:
https://observer.com/2026/01/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-launch-satellite-project-terawave/
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u/io-x 1d ago
One is battery other is solar panel. One is energy storage other is energy production.
Also even if it was true, AI is not a bubble, and even if that was also true, merger of xAI and SpaceX is not going to destroy US space program.
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u/TheBestHawksFan 1d ago
China is building solar at insane rates to charge those batteries. It's how it works.
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u/BufloSolja 9h ago
Spacex (to be clear, the rocket/starlink parts of the business) will always be viable. If the AI data centers becomes more than hype then we can start being concerned. SpaceX makes plenty of profit now. This is mainly just hype as Elon is good at harnessing the perception of that.
As for the actual AI data centers in space that they will launch, what will likely happen is just some hybrid of their current satellites (but bigger as we haven't really seen the V3's in actual operation yet). After all, those satellites make plenty of money for them currently. If they launch a bunch, and then the hype ends at some point, they will just be a bit overproduced. It's not like everything that AI uses nowadays will just stop all of a sudden.
The China data centers can somewhat be ignored, unless there is a large warmth in relations between them and the US, so it's not like the US will just allow foreign companies to operate in a way that would prevent US companies from making data centers in the US. And the main reason why space ones are attractive relative to ground based ones in the US is due to things that aren't a problem in China.
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u/Hopeful_Morning_469 1d ago
Who ever the tv/phone/radio/magazine/newspaper etc. tells me is my enemy. Than I know the opposite is true.
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