I suspect one motivation for orbital datacenters is that you get to do whatever business you want with anyone on earth, and nobody can stop you without a military strike (and the risk of Kessler syndrome). This is a position of significant political power; it is a castle on top of the biggest hill. It is a position that allows the operator to circumvent quite a lot of earthly laws — including AI regulation.
Sure: I agree that if other actors fail to negotiate for control over an ODC before you launch it, then they would need anti-satellite capability to forcibly shut it down. But presumably there are plenty of standard sources of leverage the ODC operator, e.g. fines or sanctions on the company, or legal action against individual principals.
In fact, there’s a sense in which ODCs (unlike castles) are extremely vulnerable: you can’t afford to reinforce them, you can’t easily repair them, and (importantly) the human and political costs of destroying them seem lower than on Earth (no possibility of collateral damage in the form of human life, far less collateral damage to surrounding infrastructure, no possibility of hostage-taking). And they are more vulnerable to states and sophisticated private actors, but not mercenaries or lone actors. I agree space debris makes things less clean, though directed energy weapons might make it possible to disable the ODC without blowing it up. I feel antsy talking about such things because I think our best governance mechanisms won’t involve physical destruction, but as far as the threat of physical destruction is a backstop, then I think ODCs in space might not be so bad.
It is a position that allows the operator to circumvent quite a lot of earthly laws — including AI regulation
I’m not quite sure what the suggestion is here. National and international law is at least somewhat clear on who is liable for what, and if ODCs become a bigger issue then I expect the relevant legislation will close off really obvious loopholes. For instance, if SpaceX operates ODCs, then I would assume those ODCs would still be subject to US federal regulation since SpaceX is US-domiciled. And if they cause an international incident, for example if one of their ODCs blows up and creates a bunch of debris, then the US itself is on the hook as the parent country (per Article VI of the OST + the Liability Convention). I am somewhat worried about loopholes, for example maybe an AI company could domicile in the most lenient regulatory environment for AI. But that applies to terrestrial data centers, too.
That’s not true if you and your employees are on earth. It’s like saying, “I’m building data centers in neutral waters, and no one can manage me.” Nope. It doesn’t work that way. You’re subject to the jurisdiction of the country whose flag your ship flies
You’re absolutely right that maritime law works this way—but actual shipping companies manage to get around it all the time.
1) Poorer nations compete with one another to have the absolute most permissive maritime regulations they possibly can so as to attract shipping companies registering with them as a flag state. (The money from such registry ain’t great but it makes a significant difference to certain economies).
2) The shipping companies register ships under one flag state then, if they’re ever forced to submit to regulations or go to court or anything they simply re-flag the vessel and say “Sorry, we’re Panamanian now, not Nigerian, we’re out of your jurisdiction”. Within a few years the same vessel will fall afoul of Panama’s authorities and be re-flagged as Liberian, then Bermudan, and so on.
3) When you’re deep sea, you can do all sorts of illegal stuff—under both international law and the laws of even the most permissive flag states—including gross environmental damage, forced labour, human and animal rights abuses, and nobody will ever know. This stuff happens all the time (source: spent half my life at sea). There’s very little money, political will, public demand, and practical ability to police the behaviour of vessels on the other side of the planet, the best part of a thousand miles from the nearest inhabited land and ten thousand miles from your country’s nearest government asset.
The EU is experimenting with detecting certain kinds of common deep-sea environmental crimes by satellite remote sensing—but A) this has the same jurisdictional problems as everything else and you can be sure the rest of the world won’t ever spend money on it, and B) it’s only effective for detecting one type of crime, and even then only when the resulting pollution is big enough to be seen from space. The Bermudan government developing the capability to remotely detect illegal activity inside a USA-headquartered (but Bermuda-flagged) megacorp’s satellite seems even more unlikely.
I really hope you’re right and that flag-state controls can be relied-upon to prevent illegal activity in space—but I’m afraid maritime law (and the behaviour of entirely terrestrial corporations..) doesn’t offer a very promising case-study.
The Bermudan government developing the capability to remotely detect illegal activity inside a USA-headquartered (but Bermuda-flagged) megacorp’s satellite seems even more unlikely.
… but that only applies if the illegal activity stays inside the satellite. Presumably your data center is interesting because it communicates with something on Earth. People can say, “Hey, Bermuda, we’re getting spam from your satellite, clean it up.”. Or cut off the downlink. Not to say that the international thing wouldn’t be a giant impediment to enforcement, but I don’t think it’s the same as somebody dumping fuel in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
I guess it all depends on the type of illegal activity! For spam—certainly. But for hacking, covertly developing malicious software, covertly developing bioweapons, covertly training AIs on scraped/pirated intellectual property*, conducting research in banned fields/topics, etc. I imagine probably not?
(* I have no idea whether this is even a crime—and if it is I’m not entirely convinced it should be! - but if it’s not I’m sure there are other things you could do with an AI that don’t have to leave the datacentre to be illegal)
This is only true if the development is being done autonomously from space in a way which can’t be stopped from Earth, even by the Earth-bound organization which owns it. Otherwise the threat of law or force can be applied as usual to the operator/organization on Earth.
If things have gone that far, AI regulation is likely doomed anyway, space or no space.
nobody can stop you without a military strike (and the risk of Kessler syndrome).
Would it work to send a robot to rendezvous with it and turn it so the solar cells aren’t facing the sun? Or cut the cables collecting the electricity?
One can think up countermeasures. And countermeasures to those countermeasures.
There is a question of if soft-kill or even ASAT weapons in general (barring Kessler) can keep up with the scale of new satellites being placed in orbit however. Already we launch several thousand per year. I’d guess the economics favor an actor who can spam satellites into orbit.
This is the main driving case for orbital data centers. Space development timelines are long: the irreplaceability of hardware means that as compute efficiency increases, ground based systems can swap out compute but space based ones cannot.
Datacenters are immensely unpopular on the ground and AI companies are seeking alternate places to build them.
As far as power costs go, the real tradeoff is energy storage; if batteries are cheaper than launch costs, terrestrial will beat SSO. (But realistically, everyone will keep using the short-lead, cheap and scalable option of natural gas turbines—its far easier to scale manufacturing of these than bespoke satellite buses and launch hardware)
I suspect one motivation for orbital datacenters is that you get to do whatever business you want with anyone on earth, and nobody can stop you without a military strike (and the risk of Kessler syndrome). This is a position of significant political power; it is a castle on top of the biggest hill. It is a position that allows the operator to circumvent quite a lot of earthly laws — including AI regulation.
Sure: I agree that if other actors fail to negotiate for control over an ODC before you launch it, then they would need anti-satellite capability to forcibly shut it down. But presumably there are plenty of standard sources of leverage the ODC operator, e.g. fines or sanctions on the company, or legal action against individual principals.
In fact, there’s a sense in which ODCs (unlike castles) are extremely vulnerable: you can’t afford to reinforce them, you can’t easily repair them, and (importantly) the human and political costs of destroying them seem lower than on Earth (no possibility of collateral damage in the form of human life, far less collateral damage to surrounding infrastructure, no possibility of hostage-taking). And they are more vulnerable to states and sophisticated private actors, but not mercenaries or lone actors. I agree space debris makes things less clean, though directed energy weapons might make it possible to disable the ODC without blowing it up. I feel antsy talking about such things because I think our best governance mechanisms won’t involve physical destruction, but as far as the threat of physical destruction is a backstop, then I think ODCs in space might not be so bad.
I’m not quite sure what the suggestion is here. National and international law is at least somewhat clear on who is liable for what, and if ODCs become a bigger issue then I expect the relevant legislation will close off really obvious loopholes. For instance, if SpaceX operates ODCs, then I would assume those ODCs would still be subject to US federal regulation since SpaceX is US-domiciled. And if they cause an international incident, for example if one of their ODCs blows up and creates a bunch of debris, then the US itself is on the hook as the parent country (per Article VI of the OST + the Liability Convention). I am somewhat worried about loopholes, for example maybe an AI company could domicile in the most lenient regulatory environment for AI. But that applies to terrestrial data centers, too.
That’s not true if you and your employees are on earth. It’s like saying, “I’m building data centers in neutral waters, and no one can manage me.” Nope. It doesn’t work that way. You’re subject to the jurisdiction of the country whose flag your ship flies
You’re absolutely right that maritime law works this way—but actual shipping companies manage to get around it all the time.
1) Poorer nations compete with one another to have the absolute most permissive maritime regulations they possibly can so as to attract shipping companies registering with them as a flag state. (The money from such registry ain’t great but it makes a significant difference to certain economies).
2) The shipping companies register ships under one flag state then, if they’re ever forced to submit to regulations or go to court or anything they simply re-flag the vessel and say “Sorry, we’re Panamanian now, not Nigerian, we’re out of your jurisdiction”. Within a few years the same vessel will fall afoul of Panama’s authorities and be re-flagged as Liberian, then Bermudan, and so on.
3) When you’re deep sea, you can do all sorts of illegal stuff—under both international law and the laws of even the most permissive flag states—including gross environmental damage, forced labour, human and animal rights abuses, and nobody will ever know. This stuff happens all the time (source: spent half my life at sea). There’s very little money, political will, public demand, and practical ability to police the behaviour of vessels on the other side of the planet, the best part of a thousand miles from the nearest inhabited land and ten thousand miles from your country’s nearest government asset.
The EU is experimenting with detecting certain kinds of common deep-sea environmental crimes by satellite remote sensing—but A) this has the same jurisdictional problems as everything else and you can be sure the rest of the world won’t ever spend money on it, and B) it’s only effective for detecting one type of crime, and even then only when the resulting pollution is big enough to be seen from space. The Bermudan government developing the capability to remotely detect illegal activity inside a USA-headquartered (but Bermuda-flagged) megacorp’s satellite seems even more unlikely.
4) You don’t even need to go to sea (or into space) for this sort of thing. Note for example that Meta’s digital sweatshops and workforce-wide human rights abuses are located in Kenya and Ghana rather than San Francisco.
I really hope you’re right and that flag-state controls can be relied-upon to prevent illegal activity in space—but I’m afraid maritime law (and the behaviour of entirely terrestrial corporations..) doesn’t offer a very promising case-study.
… but that only applies if the illegal activity stays inside the satellite. Presumably your data center is interesting because it communicates with something on Earth. People can say, “Hey, Bermuda, we’re getting spam from your satellite, clean it up.”. Or cut off the downlink. Not to say that the international thing wouldn’t be a giant impediment to enforcement, but I don’t think it’s the same as somebody dumping fuel in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
I guess it all depends on the type of illegal activity! For spam—certainly. But for hacking, covertly developing malicious software, covertly developing bioweapons, covertly training AIs on scraped/pirated intellectual property*, conducting research in banned fields/topics, etc. I imagine probably not?
(* I have no idea whether this is even a crime—and if it is I’m not entirely convinced it should be! - but if it’s not I’m sure there are other things you could do with an AI that don’t have to leave the datacentre to be illegal)
This is only true if the development is being done autonomously from space in a way which can’t be stopped from Earth, even by the Earth-bound organization which owns it. Otherwise the threat of law or force can be applied as usual to the operator/organization on Earth.
If things have gone that far, AI regulation is likely doomed anyway, space or no space.
Would it work to send a robot to rendezvous with it and turn it so the solar cells aren’t facing the sun? Or cut the cables collecting the electricity?
One can think up countermeasures. And countermeasures to those countermeasures.
You can do things like this, China’s Shijian-21 docked with a defunct Beidou navigation satellite and towed it into a graveyard orbit in 2022. I think this capability is still being expanded/developped.
There is a question of if soft-kill or even ASAT weapons in general (barring Kessler) can keep up with the scale of new satellites being placed in orbit however. Already we launch several thousand per year. I’d guess the economics favor an actor who can spam satellites into orbit.
This is the main driving case for orbital data centers. Space development timelines are long: the irreplaceability of hardware means that as compute efficiency increases, ground based systems can swap out compute but space based ones cannot.
Datacenters are immensely unpopular on the ground and AI companies are seeking alternate places to build them.
As far as power costs go, the real tradeoff is energy storage; if batteries are cheaper than launch costs, terrestrial will beat SSO. (But realistically, everyone will keep using the short-lead, cheap and scalable option of natural gas turbines—its far easier to scale manufacturing of these than bespoke satellite buses and launch hardware)