For the orbital data centers, it makes more sense if you think of it as many small satellites
rather then a few big ones.
SpaceX’s FCC filing talks of up to one million satellites in sun-synchronous orbit, (PDF here).
This makes the issues with cooling more manageable.
The starlink v3 satellites are supposed to have 20kw of power each,
so radiating out this waste heat on these scales is not impossible
(Elon tweets about ~100kw per ton of satellite, and designing GPUs to run at higher temperatures).
Such an orbital GPU cloud would make more sense for inference, not training.
Overall I am not yet convinced that this is competitive with earth-based data centers, but it seems less stupid than I imagined at first.
For the orbital data centers, it makes more sense if you think of it as many small satellites rather then a few big ones.
SpaceX’s FCC filing talks of up to one million satellites in sun-synchronous orbit, (PDF here).
This makes the issues with cooling more manageable. The starlink v3 satellites are supposed to have 20kw of power each, so radiating out this waste heat on these scales is not impossible (Elon tweets about ~100kw per ton of satellite, and designing GPUs to run at higher temperatures).
Such an orbital GPU cloud would make more sense for inference, not training.
Overall I am not yet convinced that this is competitive with earth-based data centers, but it seems less stupid than I imagined at first.