points by mike_hearn 3 days ago | 0 comments
Not really. In sun synchronous orbit you can use solar power without battery backup. You can't do that on Earth because of night time.
Remote towns with populations of 43 are exactly the sorts of places that are pushing back on having datacenters in their areas.
And space is the ultimate physical protection. In reality a bigger issue than GPU thefts are protests or leftist groups trying to firebomb you. See the problems the Tesla factory in Germany has had with leftist violence, like setting its electricity pylons on fire (because electric cars "consume natural resources and are not sustainable", lol). The left has become very anti-AI and so the risk of attacks on facilities, especially if built outside the USA, is quite high which in turn means you have to overbuild physical security like high fences.
[–] adrian_b 2 days ago
[–] mike_hearn 2 days ago
That's an interesting choice. All the discussion I saw before assumed sun-synchronous, you're the first to suggest otherwise.
Do you know what the capacity of this orbit is?
[–] amanaplanacanal 2 days ago
Antipathy towards AI isn't just on the left, you know. At least in the US it seems widespread, and the remote towns with population 43 are far more likely to have right wing inhabitants than left wing.
Moreover, a datacenter in a sun synchronous orbit must be able to maneuver anyway, otherwise without adjusting the orbit it will enter in the shadow of the Earth after a month or two, due to the revolution of the Earth around the Sun.
If the datacenter must make periodic adjustments of the orbit, it will need to carry a lot of fuel, especially because a datacenter will be much heavier than a typical satellite, so much more fuel will be needed for orbit changes.
Thus it is not certain that a sun synchronous orbit is the best choice. It is possible that the extra fuel required for it may make this choice worse than using another orbit where the datacenter will not have power for half of the time.