Exploring a space-based, scalable AI infrastructure system design
30 comments
·November 4, 2025ceejayoz
> In the right orbit, a solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on earth, and produce power nearly continuously, reducing the need for batteries.
Sure. Now do cooling. That this isn't in the "key challenges" section makes this pretty non-serious.
A surprising amount of the ISS is dedicated to this, and they aren't running a GPU farm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
xnx
Barely mentioning thermal management seems at odds with the X principle of "Don’t use up all your resources on the easy stuff": https://blog.x.company/tackle-the-monkey-first-90fd6223e04d
boutell
This is absolutely the first thing I looked for too. They just barely mentioned thermal management at all. Maybe they know something I don't, but I know from past posts here that many people share this concern. Very strange that they didn't go there, or maybe they didn't go there because they have no solution and this is just greenwashing for the costs of AI.
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TeMPOraL
Point solar panels away from the Sun and they work as rudimentary radiators :).
More seriously though, the paper itself touches on cooling and radiators. Not much, but that's reasonable - cooling isn't rocket science :), it's a solved problem. Talking about it here makes as much sense as taking about basic attitude control. Cooling the satellite and pointing it in the right direction are solved problems. They're important to detail in full system design, but not interesting enough for a paper that's about "data centers, but in space!".
ceejayoz
Cooling at this scale in space is very much not a solved problem. Some individual datacenter racks use more power than the entire ISS cooling system can handle.
It's solved on Earth because we have relatively easy (and relatively scalable) ways of getting rid of it - ventilation and water.
TeMPOraL
No, I meant in space. This is a solved engineering problem for this kind of missions. Whether they can make it work within the power and budget constraints is the actual challenge, but that's economics. No new tech is needed.
eminence32
Just run your AI calculations on your favorite Cryoarithmetic Engine, no problem.
stronglikedan
that's easy - just put everything right behind the solar panels /s
smlacy
The ultimate "out of sight out of mind" solution to a problem?
I'm surprised that Google has drunken the "Datacenters IN SPACE!!!1!!" kool-aid. Honestly I expected more.
It's so easy to poke a hole in these systems that it's comical. Answer just one question: How/why is this better than an enormous solar-powered datacenter in someplace like the middle of the Mojave Desert?
TeMPOraL
Think to any near-future spacecraft, or idea for spaceships cruising between Earth and the Moon or Mars, that aren't single use. What are (will be) such spacecraft? Basically data centers with some rockets glued to the floor.
It's probably not why they're interested in it, but I'd like to imagine someone with a vision for the next couple decades realized that their company already has data centers and powering them as their core competency, and all they're missing is some space experience...
ceejayoz
Sure, if you don't mind boiling the passengers.
incognito124
I think the atmosphere absorbs something like 25% of energy. If that's correct, you get a free 33% increase in compute by putting more compute behind a solar power in LEO
alooPotato
From the post they claim 8 times more solar energy and no need for batteries because they are continuously in the sun. Presumably at some scale and some cost/kg to orbit this starts to pencil out?
ceejayoz
You're trading an 8x smaller low-maintenance solid-state solar field for a massive probably high-maintenance liquid-based radiator field.
moralestapia
No infrastructure, no premises, no security, no water.
I think it's a good idea, actually.
synapsomorphy
I'm completely puzzled on why space-based compute is so exciting to everyone all of a sudden. I have worked on spacecraft and the constant power benefit seems comically far from outweighing the many, many negatives, even if launch cost is zero, which we are still very far from.
Am I missing something? Feels like an extremely strong indicator that we're in some level of AI bubble because it just doesn't make any sense at all.
candiddevmike
Since LLM results aren't trustworthy anyways, what's a few bit flips amongst friends?
visviva
It will require a number of innovations just to solve the formation flying aspect of the system, not to mention the other challenges (listed and not)... good luck with that.
mr_toad
What sort of formation are you thinking of? They’re all going to be hugging the terminator, like a big merry go round.
pr337h4m
Data centers in space are guaranteed to be a thing by 2035.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1984868748378157312
mattlutze
0.5% of the starlink node network deorbits each month currently, though potentially more.
They're already having a negative, contaminating effect on our upper atmosphere
Sending up bigger ones, and more (today there's some 8,800, but they target 30k), sounds ill-advised.
1: https://www.fastcompany.com/91419515/starlink-satellites-are... 2: https://www.science.org/content/article/burned-satellites-ar...
wongarsu
However 10 years in Musk time is at least 30 years in real time
null
Cooling is conspicuously absent other than a brief mention in the conclusion. As if it has been redacted, because it’s such an obvious and hard problem in space. Which leads me to believe they’ve made progress and aren’t sharing that for competitive reasons. There’s an extremely strong incentive for SpaceX to put GPU on board their birds for local SDR processing power, for applications like SIGINT, high channel counts, etc, and the cooling is literally the only impediment.
In fact everything in this paper is already solved by SpaceX except GPU cooling.