From TLDR 2026-02-04
DATA CENTERS IN SPACE MAKES NO SENSE (2 MINUTE READ) [7]
Data centers in space face massive challenges such as radiation,
cooling, latency, and launch costs. There are other fundamental issues
that make them unfeasible: competing in the market would require
launching hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of satellites into
space, and satellites can't be upgraded at scale. Data centers in
space only make sense if they are cost-effective relative to normal
data centers. The idea makes less and less sense with every
improvement in normal energy production.
Training and serving frontier AI at scale takes hundreds of thousands of GPUs. xAI's Colossus cluster reportedly has 200,000 GPUs. OpenAI has plans for millions of them. Competing in this market would require launching hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of satellites into space. This would utterly dwarf the roughly 15,000 satellites that are currently orbiting the earth. Satellite deployments at this scale would dramatically increase the risk of Kessler syndrome: a cascading explosion of debris crippling our access to space.
Full Story:
https://links.tldrnewsletter.com/lJqU6p
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