Technical staff are easiest to pin the blame on in any given situation. All those other fields require enormously more people skills and political inclination.

If you are in an org like that and there is an effort to pin something on technical people inappropriately the reaction when there's solid push back approaches total hysterical breakdown since it's so unexpected. Even if the tech staff "win" they'll be marked for the rest of their time there.

That matches my experience at google. Getting the land and approvals was the most time, then the basic site prep and building shells and utilities, then basic building fit out, and then finally the actual tech installs.

Well I guess we can assume that this means it's not the reason senior leadership laid them off because senior leaders definitely never scapegoat their underlings or have too little competence to correctly assess why things failed!

yes but sometimes a VP gets fired, new VP comes in, and says "we'll outsource this" or "we'll use this home grown team doing something else" and unfortunately tons of people are caught in a layoff, even if they were good.

You're assuming we'll actually have a free and fair election.

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Yeah, power utilities in the DMV area have $20B of projects to try to bring in 3GW of capacity.

You think that building out space infrastructure is a less hard problem to solve than bribing a few local governments to get some building permits?

Isn't it still far simpler and cheaper to build and maintain a DC in the most rural parts of North America than to launch it to space?

The space required to install enough solar panels, especially in the places these things are going (like Ohio, where it's NOT ideal for solar generation), would far, far outsize the data center itself by a significant magnitude.

Half the time you get 0 solar power.

It takes 2.5 million solar panels to generate 1GW of electricity assuming 400W per panel and direct sunlight. 2.5M times 18 sq ft per panel is about 1000 acres or ~1.55 sq mi.

That would work for a 1 GW data center, during the day, without clouds, during the summer.

Sending to LEO costs around $2,700 usd and 9kWh of fuel per kilogram.

If you manage to send a data center with high end processing units, large array of solar panels, even larger liquid cooling and tick shielding against solar rays you’d have spent probably 100x to 1000x the cost of an equivalent earth data center even without considering hardware deprecation.

You’re better off sinking your data center deep in the sea and even that is probably not happening at large scales.

I think the question here is: do the laws of economics allow it?

Space data centers are an intrinsically cool idea, and honestly I hope we see at least one for the sheer marvel of such a project. But to be cost efficient, it has to be cheaper than rural US, cheaper than buying some island, cheaper than setting it up on a converted freighter ship and tanking the fuel in, etc.

BUT once Earth has a fully paid off space elevator the unit economics will make sense, or if we have orbital space factories and don't have any lift costs, etc. It's all possible, but at a 50 year+ timescale and immense investment. All of which I hope for because I'd like to see more space development and exploration.

How do the laws of physics allow it? How do you disperse the heat? How do you protect your compute from cosmic rays? How do you get enough solar up there without catastrophic damage from micrometeorites?

How much SpaceX stock did you buy? Are you buying this dip?

Space data centers require hundreds of daily launches. Disney and the massive industries around Canaveral will NIMBY it hard.

Why restrict yourself to 100% solar? Solar augmented by grid is pretty great.

Also, you very conspicuously avoided talking about the difficulty/impact of a 1GW datacenter in space. One might suspect your motives aren't as impartial as you seem to think.

How do you cool the data center in space cost effectively? Unfortunately in space there isn't a lot of material (air) to transfer the heat.

100 square kilometers sounds like a big area. And it is, in continental Europe or in an urban area. In Montana, it's enough space for a few hundred cows. In desert regions, it's worth even less. You can buy 100 square kilometres of unserviced desert land for ~$10M.

SAP has largely switched over to their own HANA database for new deployments. Even before that their "AnyDB" database worked with pretty much any backend and is still supported. The reason you see oracle has less to do with what SAP wants and more to do with "It's what the company/engineers have already used/set up in the past".

Regarding Java, SAP has long switched over to openjdk (though oracle java is supported in some cases). Specifically, they have their own custom fork of openjdk "SapMachine" precisely to be independent from oracle (FYI: if you look at openjdk upstream you will see many core contributors are employed by SAP)

In general, I would say that the actual tech companies that have to interact with oracle's stuff are generally very well equipped to drop them or have already done so. The bigger issue are legacy "consumers" of oracle (e.g. if Pepsi has their data in oracle DB), which often do not have such contingencies.

It's rare for a large company to simply close down. Usually someone buys it out of bankruptcy, and keeps the profitable parts going. Database licensing definitely makes money.

yeah, like my university's whole accounting system...

oh no, not the hierarchy of consulting! the horrors. Better grab your nearest gpu and open model to replace them.

remember during covid it was deemed acceptable for the elderly to die for the economy? We need that, but for useless corporate slop that's now relaceable by useless AI slop. Slop In, Slop Out (SISO)

The boom/bust cycle is the Faustian engine of innovation. Take away the risk of busts and we have fake capitalism without innovation or renewal.