> one company ends up classed a "supply chain risk" while another agrees the the same terms that led to that
Never discount the possibility of Hegseth being petty and doing the OpenAI deal with the same terms to imply to the world that Anthropic is being unreasonable because another company signed a deal with him.
It’s been a term in rare-to-moderate use since the 1990s — Trump/Hegseth ramped it up to 11 and it’s every 3rd word out of Hegseth’s mouth because he thinks it sounds tough.
> nobody seemed to have released a version people could actually easily use
Yet I’ve known many people who have said it is difficult to use; this was a 0.01-0.1% adoption tool. There is still a huge ease of use gap to cross to make it adopted in 10-50% of computer users.
Deepmind’s Nobel Prize was primarily for its performance in CASP which is pretty much exactly this. Labs solve structures of proteins, but don’t publish them until after all the computational teams predict structures.
So I’m not sure where you’re coming from claiming that this isn’t scientific.
GLP-1 drugs don’t require marketing. There are tons of people who have been prescribed them and aren’t being covered by insurance. Both Novo and Eli Lily are now selling them direct to consumers with prescriptions that don’t have insurance coverage.
They market the service that gives you the drugs with the smallest oversight possible. These services are becoming popular among people who shouldn't be taking GLP-1s (eating disorders, body dysmorphia, people who are too thin but want to lose more weight) because most of their providers are just trying to write prescriptions as fast as possible to collect their payments.
Also the elderly and poor who cannot afford the prescriptions.
GLP-1 drugs range from $100-$200 a month from mail order compounding pharmacies, or $500 a month on "discount" plans from the drug makers.
This change to FDA enforcement is going to prevent a lot of people from getting help.
The positive impact of GLP-1 drugs is huge, but the price is out of reach for most people. The people who most benefit, elderly obese people at high risk of injury due to falls, who have a low quality of life from morbid obesity, are least able to afford access to the drugs.
These compounding pharmacies were improving a lot of lives.
Anthony Kiedis isn't headlining an event that's being put on by an expressly christian organization. He also is not closely tied to someone who's mentioned more in the Epstein Files than Harry Potter is mentioned in the Harry Potter books.
Kid Rock has some pretty infamous, explicit lyrics I won’t be pasting here. Just look it up, there are dozens of articles about this right now. It’s not rumors or something ambiguous, he is a disgusting person with some pretty awful things to say. Given TP’s christian mission/focus and constant moral panic stance, coupled with the MAGA movement’s alleged concern for minors, “he is not appropriate” is an understatement.
Unfortunately he stays somewhat relevant because he drapes himself in an American flag.
Twenty-five years after the ISS began operations in low Earth orbit, a new generation of advanced solar cells from Spectrolab, twice as efficient as their predecessors, are supplementing the existing arrays to allow the ISS to continue to operate to 2030 and beyond. Eight new arrays, known as iROSAs (ISS Roll-Out Solar Arrays) are being installed on the ISS in orbit.
The new arrays use multi-junction compound semiconductor solar cells from Spectrolab. These cells cost something like 500 times as much per watt as modern silicon solar cells, and they only produce about 50% more power per unit area. On top of that, the materials that Spectrolab cells are made of are inherently rare. Anyone talking about scaling solar to terawatts has to rely on silicon or maybe perovskite materials (but those are still experimental).
The dominant factor is "balance of system" aka soft costs, which are well over 50%.[0]
Orbit gets you the advantage of 1/5th the PV and no large daily smoothing battery, but also no on-site installation cost, no grid interconnect fees, no custom engineering drawings, no environmental permitting fees, no grid of concrete footers, no heavy steel frames to resist wind and snow loads. The "on-site installation" is just the panels unfolding, and during launch they're compact so the support structure can be relatively lightweight.
When you cost building the datacenter alone, it's cheaper on earth. When you cost building the solar + batteries + datacenter, it (can be) cheaper in space, if you build it right and have cheap orbital launch.
I do say it's predicated on cheap orbital launch. Clearly they expect Starship to deliver, and they're "skating to where the puck will be" on overall system cost per unit of compute.
But yeah, I didn't include that delivering all that stuff by truck (including all the personnel) to a terrestrial PV site isn't free either.
Yeah, soft costs like permitting and inspections are supposedly the main reason US residential solar costs $3/watt while Australian residential solar costs $1/watt. It was definitely the worst and least efficient part of our solar install, everything else was pretty straightforward. Also, running a pretty sizable array at our house, the seasonal variation is huge, and seasonal battery storage isn’t really a thing.
Besides making PV much more consistent, the main thing this seems to avoid is just the red tape around developing at huge scale, and basically being totally sovereign, which seems like it might be more important as tensions around this stuff ramp up. There’s clearly a backlash brewing against terrestrial data centers driving up utility bills, at least on the East Coast of the US.
The more I think about it, the more this seems like maybe not a terrible idea.
So far most of the datacenters are built in very convenient places and people will start to build them in inconvenient places like Sahara or Mongolia way before they will building them in space
Maybe. But for SpaceX, it’s more aligned with what they’re trying to do to just learn to manufacture them at scale and lob them into space. And one of the benefits there is the uniformity of it - they can treat them all the same, rather than dealing with a bunch in different geographies with different power issues, governmental issues, etc. That’s been one of the major issues with rolling out solar. In the US, there are >20,000 AHJs, each with different rules and processes. A huge constellation of satellites seems easier to reason about and build systems to maintain en masse, because it’s more uniform.
I’m not saying this is a good idea. I’ve got a lot of SpaceX stock, and I wasn’t really happy to hear the news, this is mostly me trying to understand why they might think this is a good idea, and brainstorming out loud, with a dash of coping. Seems most here think that it’s just stupid, but then, most commenters thought Starlink was stupid, iirc, and that turned out to be wildly wrong. But it might also just be stupid this time.
Do you imagine there'd be less red tape involved in launching multiple rockets per day carrying heavy payloads?
Like this argument just gets absurd: you're claiming building a data center on earth will be harder from a permitting perspective than FAA flight approval for multiple heavy lift rocket launch and landing cycles.
Mining companies routinely open and close enormous surface area mines all over the world and manage permitting for that just fine.
There's plenty of land no one will care if your build anything on, and being remote with maybe poor access roads is still going to be enormously cheaper then launching a state of the art heavy lift rocket which doesn't actually exist yet.
> Ok, why are so many being built in Northern Virginia, rather than in the middle of nowhere where there will be no backlash?
Right? So if that's the case why would putting them in Space, far less accessible in every conceivable way, with numerous additional expenses and engineering constraints, be cheaper?
Yeah, I don't know if it wins on cheaper, even with $2M fully reusable starship launches. Maybe rollout speed vs piecing together BD deals with a bunch of different infra providers? The expansion of the grid is going to be hamstrung until congress finally passes energy permitting reform, which they've tried and failed at repeatedly. But they could do non-interconnected microgrids in the desert like Redwood Materials has been trying.
Maybe there's a concentration in VA because there's a set of deals/procedures in place with infra providers there that make it easy to scale up, similar to how DE has well developed corporate infrastructure, so everyone incorporates there. But that stops when the area hits its limit in power provision (which seems to be happening right now). In which case, being able to do this yourself end to end by putting this stuff in space with your own power generation makes it the ultimate scale-up opportunity - no real limits on space or power availability, so once you get that method down, you can mass-scale and get great economies of scale. Maintenance isn't a thing, these will be disposable.
I think that's it, money's not the limiting factor if they can pitch this successfully, which I think they will. They want massive scale without the constraints you hit when doing it on earth. I think he's aiming for scale that we haven't seen in DCs on earth.
>why would putting them in Space, far less accessible in every conceivable way, with numerous additional expenses and engineering constraints, be cheaper?
Because mostly AI is power hungry, and in space you need 1/5th the solar panels, almost no solar panel support structure, and almost no daily load shifting batteries.
As it turns out, this matters more than launch costs or cooling radiators or radiation bit flips. This is why you need to do the math instead of assuming you know what the solution looks like.
Just based on weight, looks like a Block 4 starship should be able to bring up ~150 30 panel pallets of 550W panels, about 2 MW. They're trying to get a starship launch down to $2M with full reuse. GPU DCs are frequently in the neighborhood of 500GW, so maybe 250 launches for just the power generation, or $500M? And then there's radiators, so let's say $1B for launch of power and heat dissipation. For comparison, 500MW of H100 machines retails for >$10B, and the launch cost for those shouldn't be too bad compared to the power, since they're more value dense. And then there's land and ongoing power and cooling spending for the terrestrial version, which you don't have for the space version. So actually, doesn't seem terrible economically? This is obviously very back-of-the-envelope, and predicated on the optimistic scenario for starship launch cost.
You cannot just block out the mass of stuff and declare it'll cost exactly the launch cost, nor can you take the cost of current datacenter servers and go "they'll definitely cost the same to put in space".
A regular set of servers will straight up be destroyed if put on a rocket and launched into space: the motherboards and PCBs aren't mounted or rated to survive the vibration. The connectors and wiring isn't rated for that vibration. Sure, some probably make it, but you will lose machines from just launching them alone. Any electrolytic capacitors in there? If your system exposes them to vacuum or even just low pressure, then those likely die too. Solar panels? We can launch them obviously, there's a reason people send up expensive solar panels: because you're doing a lot of work making sure they'll physically survive the launch.
So of course, now you have to build a space-rated server frame, PCBs and GPUs. You ain't going to buying bulk H100's from Nvidia. And you have to package and mount it to get it both survive the launch and physically fit into the payload bay. Then you have to add a deployment system for it, sensors etc. And then you have to add an assembly system, because if it doesn't fit in one launch (you're proposing 250+ launches for power alone) then all of these systems need to be assembled in orbit. How are they going to be assembled? How are they going to be maneuvered? Even if you could rendezvous accurately with the construction orbit, we're talking months of drift from every little thing knocking stuff around, putting it into a spin, etc.
So either each of these is now a fully contained satellite, complete with manoeuvering system and power, or you're also needing to develop a robotic assembly system - with power and manoeuevering in order to manage and assemble all this.
And let's not forget mission control: every single one of these steps is incurring a bunch of labor costs to have people manage it. And not cheap labor costs: you're going from "guys who roll racks in and plug stuff in and can be trained up easily" to "space mission control operators".
Is this doable? Probably. Is this going to be in anyway cheaper then Earth? Not in the slightest, and it's not going to be close.
Heh relax, it’s back of the envelope to try and see if it’s anywhere in the ballpark, and if they get launch to be cheap enough, it seems like it might be. You don’t assemble one massive thing in space, it’s a bunch of disposable individual sats with laser interconnects, like Starlink.
This is really underselling it tbh. Any land that's growing corn in a developed country is likely top 1% of land on earth. Half of the earth is desert and tundra. Which is still incredibly easier to work with than space because you can ship there with a pickup very cheaply. Maybe when nevada and central australia are wall-to-wall solar panels we can check back on space.
The Technology Connections Youtube channel recently did a great video arguing pretty convincingly that the land used to grow corn for cars would be vastly more efficiently used from an energy perspective if we covered it with solar panels.
You just have to remember, most of these people live in high density regions and have little comprehension about how much surface area humanity truly occupies... And that isn't even accounting for offshore constructs.
Realizing the impracticality of it (and that such approaches often collapse under the infeasibility of it) ... wouldn't it be better to... say... cover the Sahara in solar panels instead? That's gotta be cheaper than shipping them into space.
From an engineering perspective, with today’s costs, yes. But don’t forget the political complications of dealing with all those countries that own the Sahara, that’s going to come at it’s own cost.
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