From the article: … … … This is just a tech demo (or a stunt if you’re uncharitable) and I’m skeptical that it will compete with regular data centers on costs any time soon. But they do seem...
From the article:
Last month, the Washington-based company launched a satellite with an Nvidia H100 graphics processing unit, sending a chip into outer space that’s 100 times more powerful than any GPU compute that has been in space before. Starcloud was able to train and run NanoGPT, a large language model created by OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy, on the H100 chip in orbit using the complete works of Shakespeare.
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The company’s Starcloud-1 satellite is also now running and querying responses from Gemma, an open large language model from Google based on the company’s Gemini models, in orbit, marking the first time in history that an LLM has been run on a high-powered Nvidia GPU in outer space, CNBC has learned.
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Starcloud — a member of the Nvidia Inception program and graduate from Y Combinator and the Google for Startups Cloud AI Accelerator — plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with solar and cooling panels that measure roughly 4 kilometers in both width and height. A compute cluster of that gigawatt size would produce more power than the largest power plant in the U.S. and would be substantially smaller and cheaper than a terrestrial solar farm of the same capacity, according to Starcloud’s white paper.
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Along with Starcloud and Nvidia’s efforts, several companies have announced space-based data center missions. On Nov. 4, Google unveiled a “moonshot” initiative titled Project Suncatcher, which aims to put solar-powered satellites into space with Google’s tensor processing units. Privately owned Lonestar Data Holdings is working to put the first-ever commercial lunar data center on the moon’s surface. Aetherflux, founded by former Robinhood co-founder and chief executive Baiju Bhatt, on Tuesday announced a target to deploy an orbital data center satellite in the first quarter of 2027.
This is just a tech demo (or a stunt if you’re uncharitable) and I’m skeptical that it will compete with regular data centers on costs any time soon. But they do seem rather committed to the bit.
For anyone else who was (like me) wondering "Why...?":
For anyone else who was (like me) wondering "Why...?":
Starcloud wants to show outer space can be a hospitable environment for data centers, particularly as Earth-based facilities strain power grids, consume billions of gallons of water annually and produce hefty greenhouse gas emissions. The electricity consumption of data centers is projected to more than double by 2030, according to data from the International Energy Agency.
Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston told CNBC that the company’s orbital data centers will have 10 times lower energy costs than terrestrial data centers.
“Anything you can do in a terrestrial data center, I’m expecting to be able to be done in space. And the reason we would do it is purely because of the constraints we’re facing on energy terrestrially,” Johnston said in an interview.
Only problem is you can’t fix anything that goes wrong. So you will increase costs quite a bit for redundancy and extra engineering (not to mention launch costs which aren’t cheap). What would a...
Only problem is you can’t fix anything that goes wrong. So you will increase costs quite a bit for redundancy and extra engineering (not to mention launch costs which aren’t cheap). What would a data center look like if every failure that requires hands on the hardware could never be addressed? Every year more and more goes offline forever.
I do think it’s a cool idea. But we’re missing the infrastructure necessary to support it.
Follow-up question: I understand many of the benefits of running computationally intensive (and heat-intensive) tasks in space (and demo'ing the tech now). But what kind of bandwidth is the final...
Follow-up question:
I understand many of the benefits of running computationally intensive (and heat-intensive) tasks in space (and demo'ing the tech now). But what kind of bandwidth is the final product going to need and do we currently have the price-performance to make that amount of bandwidth even happen in the next couple of years? I know that satellite bandwidth has gotten a lot cheaper and even cellular phone carriers are offering services (along with things like Garmin's inReach satellite texting communication that's been in consumers' hands foe 10+ years), but how much cheaper? Datacenters have staggeringly huge pipes these days so I'm wondering how much bandwidth the data from an AI question-response session would take and how much of it they plan to have completed in orbit.
The article says they're planning not to have a geostationary orbit for the 5-gigawatt satellite so that it can gather solar energy without day/night restrictions, but they would have to get other satellites up just to carry the communication signals to whatever side(s) of the planet the data is being sent. So bandwidth really becomes a huge factor as more hops are added to the transmission. Are there companies looking at developing this tech with geosynchronous orbits with a dedicated ground receiving station? And how expensive is that real estate about to get? Would those companies be looking at more equatorial regions for the ground stations (or perhaps just Texas and Florida)?
Ok, but instead you have to [waves arms skyward] pay to launch them into freaking orbit. And it's not like you have long to recoup your costs before your data center needs upgraded hardware...
Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston told CNBC that the company’s orbital data centers will have 10 times lower energy costs than terrestrial data centers.
Ok, but instead you have to [waves arms skyward] pay to launch them into freaking orbit. And it's not like you have long to recoup your costs before your data center needs upgraded hardware launched into orbit, GPU tech iterations can be measured in months, not years.
I wonder if they will take a page out of military hardware sales and allow out-dated assets to be sold to allies and partners who otherwise can't buy or built the technology themselves. 4th...
And it's not like you have long to recoup your costs before your data center needs upgraded hardware ...
I wonder if they will take a page out of military hardware sales and allow out-dated assets to be sold to allies and partners who otherwise can't buy or built the technology themselves. 4th generation aircraft can be sold to pretty much anyone, depending on the avionics, while 5th generation (and 4.5-gen) is reserved for partner countries with a special status so that the manufacturing countries are in control of the other country's capabilities.
I can't claim to have thought of this myself but one possible reason people are really interested in having data centers in space could be the lack of government jurisdiction. I struggle to think...
I can't claim to have thought of this myself but one possible reason people are really interested in having data centers in space could be the lack of government jurisdiction.
I struggle to think that any of the other benefits outweigh the risk and cost of launching all that expensive, fragile, and quickly outdated tech into space and dealing with the challenges of cooling in a vacuum.
From the article:
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…
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This is just a tech demo (or a stunt if you’re uncharitable) and I’m skeptical that it will compete with regular data centers on costs any time soon. But they do seem rather committed to the bit.
For anyone else who was (like me) wondering "Why...?":
Only problem is you can’t fix anything that goes wrong. So you will increase costs quite a bit for redundancy and extra engineering (not to mention launch costs which aren’t cheap). What would a data center look like if every failure that requires hands on the hardware could never be addressed? Every year more and more goes offline forever.
I do think it’s a cool idea. But we’re missing the infrastructure necessary to support it.
Follow-up question:
I understand many of the benefits of running computationally intensive (and heat-intensive) tasks in space (and demo'ing the tech now). But what kind of bandwidth is the final product going to need and do we currently have the price-performance to make that amount of bandwidth even happen in the next couple of years? I know that satellite bandwidth has gotten a lot cheaper and even cellular phone carriers are offering services (along with things like Garmin's inReach satellite texting communication that's been in consumers' hands foe 10+ years), but how much cheaper? Datacenters have staggeringly huge pipes these days so I'm wondering how much bandwidth the data from an AI question-response session would take and how much of it they plan to have completed in orbit.
The article says they're planning not to have a geostationary orbit for the 5-gigawatt satellite so that it can gather solar energy without day/night restrictions, but they would have to get other satellites up just to carry the communication signals to whatever side(s) of the planet the data is being sent. So bandwidth really becomes a huge factor as more hops are added to the transmission. Are there companies looking at developing this tech with geosynchronous orbits with a dedicated ground receiving station? And how expensive is that real estate about to get? Would those companies be looking at more equatorial regions for the ground stations (or perhaps just Texas and Florida)?
Ok, but instead you have to [waves arms skyward] pay to launch them into freaking orbit. And it's not like you have long to recoup your costs before your data center needs upgraded hardware launched into orbit, GPU tech iterations can be measured in months, not years.
I wonder if they will take a page out of military hardware sales and allow out-dated assets to be sold to allies and partners who otherwise can't buy or built the technology themselves. 4th generation aircraft can be sold to pretty much anyone, depending on the avionics, while 5th generation (and 4.5-gen) is reserved for partner countries with a special status so that the manufacturing countries are in control of the other country's capabilities.
I can't claim to have thought of this myself but one possible reason people are really interested in having data centers in space could be the lack of government jurisdiction.
I struggle to think that any of the other benefits outweigh the risk and cost of launching all that expensive, fragile, and quickly outdated tech into space and dealing with the challenges of cooling in a vacuum.