In a blog post, Musk said the acquisition was warranted because global electricity demand for AI cannot be met with “terrestrial solutions,” and Silicon Valley will soon need to build data centers in space to power its AI ambitions.

This dumb fuck. Unfortunately, his boosters will be all-in on this messaging. Whatever.

  • Dead_or_Alive@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    ·
    3 hours ago

    The government will not let SpaceX fail, it’s a strategic asset and Musk knows this. He is going to tie his Xai to it and saddle it with all the debt it is incurring. When the AI bubble pops he will be able to ask for bail outs to keep SpaceX afloat.

  • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    20
    ·
    4 hours ago

    So he decided to ruin his one successful company. Which is successful because he wasn’t involved in running it until now.

  • CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    22
    ·
    5 hours ago

    Space is the worst place for high powered servers because of all the heat involved along with the inability to perform maintenance. It’s just a grift, it will not be profitable to put HPC GPUs in orbit.

  • stoy@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    33
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    6 hours ago

    “…creating the worlds most overvalued private company.”

    FTFY.

  • cronenthal@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    67
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    7 hours ago

    Financial trickery is what this is. Rolling one failing business into the next, Tesla will follow soon. It’s incredible that this is even legal, but of course nothing matters anymore in Trump’s America.

    • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      5 hours ago

      The stupid thing is that it‘s perfectly legal as long as nobody looks into it and because it‘s a US corporation nobody will look into it.

  • Herr_S_aus_H@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    4 hours ago

    How little of an understanding of how the natural world works do you need to have to think that data centers in space are a good idea? Nothing to say of economics and logistics. Or am I missing something big here?

    • lost_faith@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      7 minutes ago

      Well there will be them there amazing Optimus robots on board to do all that maintenance, obviously. Don’t worry, the great K has thought of all the angles, genius that he is and all.

      Wow, that was harder to write than I thought it would be

  • Hayduke@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    29
    ·
    8 hours ago

    You mean that guy who desperately tried to invite himself to an island to rape kids, but was deemed too big of a weirdo and jackass?

    Yeah cool, go AI rockets or whatever.

    I guess do feel bad for the innovators and engineers that are doing actual cool shit in his companies. Must suck to be downstream of that shithead. So much potential, so much stigma (for the company, not the pedo fuckhead)

  • WanderingThoughts@europe.pub
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    5 hours ago

    A million satellites he says. That’s 100 satellites per starship launch. 5 times per day, every day, for five years. By the time you’re done, the first ones are burned out and you have to do it all again. And that’s assuming one GPU per satellite because solar panels even in space can’t pull enough power to feed multiple of those hungry things.

    • Iseja@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      4 hours ago

      Energy is the least of their concerns, getting rid of the heat is a much bigger problem.

        • Iseja@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 hour ago

          Yeah it is a proven tech but requires quite a lot of space/weight and usually when satellites get the most energy from solar panels they also “generate” the most heat.

        • mcv@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 hour ago

          Space feels cold if you have some fluid to evaporate, like blood or something. But servers will very quickly run out of whatever fluids they have if they tried this. (And so would you in their place.)

          The only option to sustainably lose heat in space is radiation, which works, but is slow and limited in capacity, so these server satellites would need massive radiators. It’s not impossible to do. ISS also has massive radiators.

          So servers in space is possible. How big you can make an orbital server park, I don’t know. I can imagine that with enough radiators, they start catching each other’s heat, so there might be a limit to have many radiators you can put closely together, but I have no idea what that limit might be.

        • realitista@lemmus.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          ·
          edit-2
          3 hours ago

          It’s a vacuum. Which means that there aren’t atoms to get hot or cold. Which means there is no medium with which to exchange heat to cool something down, unless you are willing to bring a bunch of your own air to blow over the servers and then vent into space. Which means bringing an awful lot of air with you.

          A server sitting in the vacuum of space would quickly over heat for lack of ventilation (if it didn’t get destroyed because it wasn’t structurally engineered to run in a vacuum).

          • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            3 hours ago

            I wasn’t being serious by the way, but thanks for the detailed explanation of why, always appreciated to know the actual ins and outs no matter the topic.

            • realitista@lemmus.org
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              edit-2
              2 hours ago

              Wait, I just did some research and it turns out I’m partially wrong about this.

              While I am correct that you can’t cool in the way we do on earth by bringing cool air to carry away the heat, there is another way to cool things as used by space stations and satellites.

              That is you can take the heat and radiate it into space as Infrared radiation. IR radiation is able to travel through space as it is made of photons.

              Indeed now that I think about it, that’s why how our FLIR detectors work on earth too. They can measure the infrared radiation that is one of the 2 ways things vent heat even on earth (the second being by exchanging heat with another fluid such as air or water or something more exotic). It turns out that about ~1/3 of radiation from a radiator is actually infrared light while the other ~2/3 is fluid heat exchange, usually with air.

              So I am wrong. I’m not sure how effective this would be for the amount of heat generated by servers, but it’s not actually fully disqualified as I thought it would be.

              • NaibofTabr@infosec.pub
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                3
                ·
                1 hour ago

                That is you can take the heat and radiate it into space as Infrared radiation. IR radiation is able to travel through space as it is made of photons.

                I’m not sure how effective this would be for the amount of heat generated by servers, but it’s not actually fully disqualified as I thought it would be.

                This is how the International Space Station deals with waste heat: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/473486main_iss_atcs_overview.pdf

                It’s very slow compared with convective cooling, definitely not practical for running any high-powered computer hardware, slow enough that it can be considered disqualified.

              • bebabalula@feddit.dk
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                1 hour ago

                Some back of the envelope: An ideal black-body at 100 C will radiate something like a kW pr m2, give or take. So one h100 at 700W(?) would probably need a reflector of around one m2. Very rough but it’s probably within an order of magnitude so it’s not impossible, but just adds to the engineering and logistics challenges.

  • bagsy@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    30
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    8 hours ago

    hopefully his shitty AI will tank his nazi rockets. one can only hope.

    • NarrativeBear@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      34
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      8 hours ago

      It kind of sucks because the people working at spaceX are actually doing great things as a whole.

      Just sucks a person like muskrat is the face of it.

      • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        5 hours ago

        The people at SpaceX are poisoning landscapes that used to be neighborhoods with toxic waste because the company doesn‘t give a shit about the environment, people or the planet. Fuck whoever works at SpaceX and partakes in this. Oh, they‘re also making Musk even more powerful so that‘s a double L.

        • MrSpArkle@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          10
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          6 hours ago

          NASA has contracted out basically all their rockets. We need spacex. Elon needs to be in jail. If only for threatening national security with this dumb move. Never mind being a Nazi and election interference.

            • halcyoncmdr@piefed.social
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              5 hours ago

              HA!

              You should look into where the Nazi rocket scientists went after WW2 and how few of them saw any form of punishment for their involvement.

              And that doesn’t even take into account the pseudo-Nazis running the current US government, which is certainly what the other poster was talking about.

              Nazis and NASA are like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

            • ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              6 hours ago

              Oh, so NASA os not qctually a government agency? Neat…when did they separate out from the government, I must have missed that