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We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.
(www.technologyreview.com)
this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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Solar powered server farms in space. Self-powered, self-cooling, 'outside the environment'. Is this a stupid idea?
Edit: So it would seem the answer is yes. Good chat :) Thanks.
Launch cost is astronomical.
Maintenance access is horrible.
Temperature delta is insane, upto 250C.
I don’t understand the self-cooling. Isn’t it harder to keep things cool in space since there is no conduction or convection cooling? I mean everything is in a vacuum. The only place for heat to go is radiative and that’s terribly inefficient. Seems like a massive engineering problem.
It is, infrared radiators weight a shit ton and are inefficient, big and unwieldy. Still the only viable option for cooling in space. AI would take an hugemongous square footage of it just so the GPUs won't melt.
I thought so.
You can cool servers way better on Earth than you can in space. Down here you can transfer heat away from the server with conduction and convection, but in space you really only have radiation. Cooling spacecraft is an engineering challenge. One might imagine a server stuck inside a glass thermos that's sitting out in the sun.
Afaik space isn't self cooling. Overheating of spacecraft is a thing. I think they can only cool through infrared radiation or something.
If the end goal is so little Timmy can ask a robot if nazis exist and it spits out misinformation or so Ai bots can flood social media with endless regurgitated bullshit, then no, it's just more garbage in space.
Ai is interesting,... necessary? A lot of people can be fed and housed for the cost of giant, experimental solar powered Ai computers in space so that they have more excuses not to pay people a living wage.
When I think about the potential of AI, I like to think of Iain M. Banks' Culture more than Skynet. We could probably all live in a post-scarcity society even without AI if we put our minds into it, but let's free ourselves of unnecessary or unwilling labour while we're at it, eh?
I'm glad someone's hopeful. Any time I see a new technology, I wonder what the worst possible outcome could be, and it usually makes it there.
Sorry, I just have zero faith in humanity.
Oh, I have zero expectation of an actual positive outcome. I don't think the tech-bros read. Or think ahead.
Do you know how much energy you need to launch a kilogram into Earth orbit?
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3990472/china-takes-edge-computing-to-orbit-with-first-space-based-processing-network.html
So someone thinks it's not entirely stupid
I assume yes, I know very little but I know space is very hard and harsh environment. Also it would be very expensive I assume. And it would need to be big.
very stupid. One of the most difficult things in space is cooling stuff. Sending up a bunch of space heaters in a box (almost all of the energy pumped into a computer is turned into heat. The actual computatiion takes next to nothing in comparison) is definitely not a good idea. Definitely not one thought up by a technical person.
also, you can make computers much more cheap and reliable, more maintainable and much much faster, if you protect them from space radiation by operating them down here, under the protection of earth's atmosphere.