MAY Reddit Mentions | ChartExchange

The Economist also takes other hare-brained ideas like flying cars or hyperloops "seriously".
You can put the benefits of orbital centers on one side and compare them to costs.
From a strictly economic point of view, the main benefit is solar power without any atmospheric attenuation, and no variation throughout the year. If you park the data center on the right orbit, you can reach up to 24/7 solar irradiation. But keep in mind that in low-Earth orbits (where we have most satellites, Starlinks, ISS, etc.), the Earth casts shadow like 50% of the time.
So with all that let's say we get to 5-7x more solar power per square meter. If you need, say 1 square kilometer of solar panels in orbit, on Earth you'd need, in the worst case, maybe 10x so much. On Earth you'd also need battery storage to last you through the night, overcast days, winters etc.
So let's go with a kind of worst case scenario. You have a 1 GW data center, you'd need 10 GW solar power capacity, in order to account for winters and bad weather (assume 10% effective power generation in the worst case). At $1/W, that's $10 billion for the power generation.
In winter, let's say we produce the 1 GW necessary. But bad weather can temporarily reduce power output. Let's say we want a week's battery capacity. That's 150 GWh of battery storage. That's $20 billion at current rates.
That's $30 billion in clean 24/7 energy & storage for a 1 GW data center. And this is kind of the worst case estimate, where we install enough to last a week long winter snow storm. But in summer we are overproducing by a factor of 10. In practice, you'd connect the powerplant to the grid and balance supply and demand across timezones, local weather, etc. But let's be generous to orbital data centers here.
Now, how much is the actual data center? Estimates of the cost of a 1 GW AI data center are in the tens of billions. Let's say $50 billion. A large chunk of the cost are the compute hardware, but cooling and power infrastructure are also expensive for such huge installations.
So, on Earth: a fully self-sufficient, off-the-grid 1 GW data center would be $50b (data center) + $30b (power + energy storage).
As I said, the main benefit of the orbit is more power. We wouldn't need 10x overcapacity to last us through cold winters. We could just install, say 2 GW of solar capacity, and batteries to last a few hours (to cover the transit through Earth's shadow, unforeseen complications, etc.). So we save 80% on solar panels (only $2 billion) and virtually everything on battery storage (let's say only $1 billion).
So, in Orbit: a similar setup would save 90% of power-associated costs. That's $27 billion less than the standard Earth's surface scenario. So this gives us a budget to work with. If we can design, build, launch, and maintain a data center in orbit such that it only costs \~50% more than on Earth (cost on Earth $50b, 54% of that is the $27b budget), there MAY be a chance for it to be economical.
So the ultimate question is: can we even get this shit to space for less than that?
How much do we need to launch into orbit? If you just look at the solar, at imagine some novel ultra-thin, ultra-light panels, 10x lighter than what we use down here, for a 2 GW capacity we still look at \~10 million kilogram. Even if we ignore the batteries, space will need sufficient heat sinks to dump all the heat accumulated from the incident solar radiation. Let's be generous and assume that's gonna be just another 10 million kilogram. Then look at the hardware. Let's ignore the weight of everything else, and only look at the actual server racks that we would need. For a 1 GW data center, using cutting edge NVIDIA's GB200 NVL72 server racks, we look at \~130 kW of compute for \~1'300 kilogram, or about 10 kg per kW of compute. That's another 10 million kilogram.
All in all, we need to bring, at the very least, 30 million kilogram of stuff into space. In reality, with all the struts, and cooling systems, and power infrastructure, and cosmic radiation shielding, and fuel + engines for maintaining orbit, and more realistic solar panel and heat sink weight budgets, I could imagine easily double that. But let's go with 30 million kilogram.
At the moment, SpaceX has the lowest cost per kg to LEO. They charge around $7k / kg. Let's say that they could do it, at cost, for only half of that (no profits, no error margins, economy of scale, and all that). Let's take $3k per kg. Just for the shit we listed above, we'd need nearly $100 b in launch costs alone. That's just how much it would cost to bring the material to space.
Forget assembly, maintenance, lifetime costs, emergency repairs, the design and construction of cooling systems, designing and building the compute optimized for orbital operations, forget all that. Just launching it at our current cheapest costs is already 3x above our budget.
And just to remind you, for the surface installation, we went with the worst case estimates, building out 10x overcapacity and battery storage for a week. In practice, you'd just connect it to a grid, sell power in summer and buy in winter.
To me it simply makes no sense. Let's say we bring launch costs down by a factor of 10. That's the current best estimates to what is physically possible with fully reusable systems in the next decades. We'd still be left with a scenario where the budget to make it work and bring it up to space is just about the same as the cost of the pure compute. Just the NVIDIA server racks of a 1 GW data center cost on the order of $25 billion. Even if we could teleport it to orbit, we'd need to build and figure out everything, including the maintenance/life time cost, with a budget comparable to the raw compute itself. And I used the best case estimates for the space centers and the worst case ones for regular ones.
That's already extremely difficult on Earth, where the cost of data centers is often more than double that of the compute itself. How can we do it even cheaper in space?
This whole thing simply makes no sense. Not to mention, it introduces a bunch of new issues, like larger latency, variable latency throughout the orbit, space debris/micro-asteroid collisions, bandwidth limitations, the cost of terrestrial communications to send and receive all the data (can't just use optic fiber).
I am pretty sure this will never work.

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