[googleme]

It's widely reported that Musk is a majority shareholder of xAI and the controlling shareholder of SpaceX (close to 80% of voting shares). Not surprising that he would be looking to consolidate ownership under one entity especially if he perceives significant synergies (i.e., data centres in space).

[alex_young]

Data centers in space are a hilariously bad idea. Where would the heat go? This idea is like the opposite of liquid cooling.

[gordonhart]

Shocked to see SpaceX buy the datacenter in space meme. Where does the power come from? Where does the heat go? Why add (high) launch costs to your buildout capex? Why add radiation as another risk factor to your already-unreliable GPUs? Am I missing something fundamental here...?

[brightball]

Aside from Elon Musk, there are a few other people with a lot of capital aiming to do the same thing. That means, either they are all wrong (possible) or this problem has been solved somehow and the solution itself is not public.

Google and Amazon are doing the same thing. Maybe it is a moonshot (pun intended), but Musk is hardly alone in the push.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/bezos-and-musk-race-to-bring-data-c...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/technology/space-data-cen...

[pppone]

Not to mention the huge issues of cosmic rays. Sure, if the lifespan of the satellite is expected to be low, then maybe tolerable. But even then, how would this be financially viable?

[falloutx]

Only a person who is high as a kite can think thats a good idea.

[googleme]

I didn't say it was a good idea, just that if Musk perceives it's a good idea then it makes sense why he would want to combine the two businesses.

[Hikikomori]

Some guy on hacker news argued they could just use radiators.

[gspr]

Indeed. But it's also a hilariously Musky idea! Some moderate technical competence paired with sociopathy and an ego orders of magnitude too big, and voila, you get Cybertrucks, Hyperloops, Neuralinks, Teslabots, datacenters in space, and all the other garbage the man spews.

I cannot wait for him to one day be hit in the face by reality.

[newyankee]

I have never understood how Data centers in space ever make economic sense, the payload, latency and many other issues make it difficult at least for the immediate needs

[ben_w]

DCs in space have a lot of problems, but latency isn't really one of them. At least for inference*, I don't care if a chat response comes with a 0.2 second ping time (Earth-GEO-Earth at the speed of light), and I definitely don't care if a vibe coding session has a 2.5 second ping time (Earth-Moon-Earth).

I wonder what the largest viable ping time would be, for vibe coding? If it exceeds 40 minutes (my pre-Christmas experimentation would have been fine with that but it was just experiments), these things could be on Mars on the opposite side of the sun and still be useful.

* I have no idea what training needs, neither fundamentally nor currently in practice

[gspr]

You mean unlike Hyperloops, Cybertrucks, Teslabots, Neuralinks, and all the other insane stuff that moron cooks up?

[pantalaimon]

Latency isn't an issue with Starlink - the data centers are in low earth orbit, not in GEO