I think the cooling mass is so expensive and fragile that it’s basically an unsolved problem.

The public doesn't need to. If these companies actually try to build datacenters in space they will bankrupt themselves. It's a ridiculously stupid idea.

That sounds like a fun challenge! DIY ASAT when?

So? Feels like a real xkcd.com/538 situation to me. An angry mob would be more of a threat to the people than the tech.

It is... he's working it off of a Starlink satellite getting 20 kW of power.

A traditional data center's rack is about 10 kW of power. A rack in an hyperscaler datacenter averages at 60 kW. (Source: https://www.nlyte.com/blog/data-center-rack-power-costs-a-co... )

While cooling is theoretically possible, being a third of a rack in a data center...

https://www.racksolutions.com/news/blog/how-many-servers-doe...

There are about 35,000 racks in a data center.

But also... that's not the scale that's being talked about.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-buil...

    A chief reason to put orbital data centers in space is the free, limitless power from the Sun. Based on the schematic SpaceX released, each of its AI1 satellites would have solar panels encompassing about 600 square meters, or about 1.5 times the size of a basketball court. These solar panels would generate 150 kW of peak power and 120 kW of average power for computing.

It's "easy" (as far as launching a rocket is "easy") to put a satellite into space. The scale needed to replace a single data center is what's being questioned.

The proposals talk about tens of kilowatts for a satellite - a fraction of a rack.

Individual data centers get measured in gigawatts.

xAI has its Southaven data center under construction and estimated to consume 2.0 GW. If we assume the SpaceX planned satellites and the 120 kW of average power - that's 17,000 satellites to replace one data center.

... and that's assuming that you're putting all of them in the sun synchronous dawn dusk orbit so that you can get 100% solar availability. If you put in in a different orbit you're getting 50% sun and need some combination of more capacity (more satellites), more battery (more mass), and more solar (more mass to charge the battery to supply power).

Scott Manley's video is an excellent "can you" given the power for a single satellite based on Starlink in space. The answer is yes - you can put 10 kW of compute in space without too much difficulty.

Can you put 2 GW of compute in space to offset one data center on Earth?

Sarcasm?

You’re saying they just deployed an open model so no security concerns for this at the moment, yes?

> The standard motivation is 24/7 unfiltered sunlight to power the AI with, where you're not in anyone's backyard and don't need to convince a planning commission.

The orbit that this is in doesn't meet that criteria. While it is in a near polar orbit, it is not in a dusk dawn orbit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit ). Half of its orbit is in shadow.

As I wrote this, it is above Campo Grande, Brazil. The time there is 10 pm.

https://satellitemap.space/sat/100902

    1 A0902U 26227V   26304.16445033  .00002596  00000-0  13395-3 0  9997
    2 A0902  97.4408  13.1552 0001768  65.9370 294.2048 15.17216777  4461

You do, though. The FAA/AST govern launches. I'm no rocket scientist but building a rocket and launching it is probably much harder than building a small data center.

None of those things are true.

AIs are already doing illegal things

Why yes, I sure can!

> The chips can operate for about 15 minutes in space before needing to be shut down so they can cool off, said Travis Beals, Google’s senior director of product management for Project Suncatcher.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/technology/google-suncatc...

Did they actually have to launch the thing to do that testing? I think a much simpler and more direct explanation is that it is simply a deceptive marketing stunt. "Hey look we're solving the power problem, don't worry we'll be able to build all these megawatts of compute we promised" when in reality it will never happen and they had no intention of even trying. It's a short term con to try to calm fears in the market that the promises exceed their capabilities.