Eric Schmidt apparently bought Relativity Space to put data centers in orbit
“Gives you a sense of how big this crisis is.”…
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I genuinely cannot understand his point of view. AI data centers in space? I guess we’ll just make a solar veil the size of Texas to power it. And the cooling would have to be done by opening it up to let the solar winds cool everything. We can also have the ISS come fix something when it breaks. But otherwise: This dude just sounds like the guy who wanted to visit the Titantic in a carbon fiber bean. I can’t help but feel like he knows this is just a stupid idea and is going to embezzle the investor money
Pretty sure what makes this attractive is the extraterritoriality. The first step to sovereign corporations, free from any pesky government rules and regulations
It would be so much easier, cheaper and more practical to just retrofit a cargo ship and float it in international waters...or pick a jurisdiction on land that doesnt give a shit as long as you pay them.
I'm thinking mid to long term here. International waters are nice and all, but not really an ungoverned space. If these people have true megacorp ambitions, as in, toppling governments; establishing corporate ruled fiefdoms, commanding private militaries etc. A ship at sea is just another target for the enemy.
Seems more sensible to use this current period of virtually exclusively private space travel to ensure space becomes a privately and not government controlled domain by deploying their tech first and fast, before legislation can catch up.
What are the governments gonna do if google quickly brings a reactor powered data silo into space, and then some defensive satellites? Slap some ICBMs on there or maybe a railgun. Before states and nations are even able to act as a sovereign in space, those corpos will have claimed it already.
The datacenter may be out of the reach of terrestrial law enforcement, but the company directors won't be.
Fair point, but assuming they manage to get orbital weapons up there, is any government willing to drone strike some replaceable executives if the threat of a nuke looms overhead? Even if they can't hit terrestrial targets for now, shooting down rivaling satellites and other comms infrastructure (or even shuttles?) seems a pretty powerful deterrent to most developed countries because they are so dependent on it.
The US, China, Russia and more all have the capability to reach out and touch a data center in orbit. Further, such a facility wont last long without regular and extensive ground based support, which will very much be in someone's jurisdiction. Finally, if a mega corp cant even get one government somewhere on Earth to let them operate a single micro data center without interference then they hardly have the pull required to make a play at world domination.
This is a solid take.
And the cooling would have to be done by opening it up to let the solar winds cool everything
Space is cold as fuck, might not be the worst idea
edit: from the article itself
Such data centers, ideally, would be powered by solar panels and be able to radiate heat into the vacuum of space.
Getting rid of waste heat is a huge problem in space. Vacuum is a great insulator because there's no material to conduct heat away from an object.
The idea of space being "cold" has more to with pressure (or lack thereof) rather than temperature, because ideal gas law:
If you suddenly expose a pressurized container full of heated atmosphere to vacuum, you get a massive pressure drop and therefore also a massive temperature drop.
You can't do this to cool a computer system in space - you would need a constant supply of some fluid or gas that you could just dump into space that would take the heat out with it.
In the shade, but that's not always available in orbit. The ISS uses massive radiators to shed waste heat.
I suppose you could use a heat pump to concentrate internal heat around the hull for radiation into space. The datacenter could “operate” (assuming we’re just running a Minecraft server lol) while in sunlight while actively cooling and buffering excess heat, then in the shade it could continue to cool off to a safe level using solar reserves or just sit idly.
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