[kortex]

lol WHAT?

AI datacenters are bottlenecked by power, bandwidth, cooling, and maintenance. Ok sure maybe the Sun provides ample power, but if you are in LEO, you still have to deal with Earth's shadow, which means batteries, which means weight. Bandwidth you have via starlink, fine. But cooling in space is not trivial. And maintenance is out, unless they are also planning some kooky docking astromech satellite repair robot ecosystem.

Maybe the Olney's lesions are starting to take their toll.

Weirdest freaking timeline.

[crote]

The shadow thing can be solved by using a sun-synchronous orbit. See for example the TRACE solar observation satellite, which used a dawn/dusk orbit to maintain a constant view of the sun.

Cooling, on the other hand? No way in hell.

[clausz]

Every telco satellite can cool its electronics. However, more than a few kW is difficult. The ISS has around 100kW and is huge and in a shadow half the time.

[SJC_Hacker]

> Cooling, on the other hand? No way in hell.

Space is actually really cold when the sun is blocked

So, solar panels on side, GPUs on the other, maybe with a big ass radiator ...

[giancarlostoro]

The cooling is the bit where I'm lost on, but it will be interesting to see what they pull off. It feels like everyone forgets Elon hires very smart people to work on these problems, it's not all figured out by Elon Musk solely.