this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Data centers in space are a tool. You have to know when and how to use them. I'm not saying they're completely useless, but most people do not understand how to avoid the difficult and expensive orbital logistics, power and cooling issues, radiation problems or the slow and complicated networking (unlike me, of course people like me know how to avoid them). Obviously it's ludicrous to suggest space station server farms don't have their uses and I'm not the kind of luddite saying nobody should ever be putting data centers in space, but right now they should really only be used together with terrestrial data centers and not relied on exclusively. That said, it's still early days and we will inevitably be seeing a lot more compute in the orbit.
+1, also it's just unrealistic when people say we should stop using orbital data centres. They’re here and we should get used to them, because nothing we do can influence their development. Also, we need to be involved in the space data center industry or we won’t be able to influence their development later.*
*
yes, I have heard this in the wild. I have literally heard someone say that there’s nothing we can do about AI and then immediately suggest that we can and should do something about AI.the chair of my cs department at a public university expressed this sentiment
"the cat's out of the bag, now we must teach students to use it responsibly"
BECAUSE THAT HAS WORKED SO WELL BEFORE
(sorry for shouting)
My poe detection wasn't sure until the last sentence used the "still early" and "inevitably" lines. Nice.
I get what you're saying.
I hate when they make us untangle these linguistic knots. I think this is a motte-and-bailey^1^ situation, like how the oppo respond to AI (LLM) criticism by implying we don't like AI (ML i.e. the old thing that works).
They likewise want datacenters (Big Hot Steaming Shitbox of GPUs...IN SPACE) not datacenters (radiation hardened, multiply-redundant, low-power industrial CPU clusters...IN SPACE)
^1^ ugh sorry having a brain fart and cant think of a better term
Edit: I am reliably informed that I let one go over my head. Apologies!
In my defense, I would be entirely unsurprised if you turned out to be an expert in this stuff lol
I was just riffing on the AI "moderate" talking points. Building a data center in space is prima facie ludicrously stupid and you would need an extremely unusual justification to even consider it. I was pretending to act like a moron who blindly accepts there's probably a serious reason why they make sense just because some dumbass hype man said so.
that /s tag really is useful… i wasn’t sure if you were serious or not
That's a calculated risk I take with deadpan humor. This time I cut it close.
@bitofhope
The place for space data centers is in manned space stations to support the work being done there.