Eric Schmidt apparently bought Relativity Space to put data centers in orbit
Eric Schmidt apparently bought Relativity Space to put data centers in orbit
arstechnica.com
Eric Schmidt apparently bought Relativity Space to put data centers in orbit
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.
This is a solid take.
Space is cold as fuck, might not be the worst idea
edit: from the article itself
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.