SPACEX AND NVIDIA PUT THE FIRST COMPUTE RACK IN ORBIT IN 2027. IT’S THE WORST PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE FOR A DATA CENTER!
You know the fans inside your computer? They push cool air over the chips. Air. And you know what kills cooling? Vacuum. And that’s where they want to put the data centers for Artificial Intelligence? Let’s try to understand this.
SpaceX and NVIDIA made it official. First compute rack in space, built on Vera Rubin NVL72, planned for the end of 2027. Musk says it will be significantly simpler, cheaper and denser than one built down here. Hardened against radiation and orbital heat, running agentic AI, Grok included, without the power and cooling limits we have on the ground. Sam Altman questioned whether it’s even feasible. The partnership is going ahead anyway.
On power, Musk is right. Up there that limit really does go away. On cooling, no. A data center on the ground doesn’t destroy heat. It moves it. It hands it to the air, to the water, to the river, to the night. There is always something out there that takes it. In vacuum, there is nothing. No air to move. No water to circulate. Nobody to pass the parcel to. The only way to get rid of heat is to radiate it, throw it out as infrared from enormous panels. And that is far slower than a fan. Vacuum is a thermos.
And last but not least, density. The thing they sell us as the advantage, all those chips packed close together, is exactly what you can’t handle in vacuum. The tighter you pack, the hotter it runs. The more it cooks and the heat has nowhere to go.
So I’m sure that Elon Musk will sort it out. But the problem is that when someone tells you there are no limits up there, they’re listing the ones they know, not the ones they’ll find. So it can’t be done? Of course it can. And it will succeed. But under conditions that today are bad. Maybe in the future less bad. But for whom? For Musk, for sure. Because he owns the whole chain. For everybody else, is it the same thing? Maybe not. So when you say that data centers and space are a good thing, you must think about all of this. Good luck, Musk.
What do you think?
#ArtificialDecisions #MCC #SpaceComputing #ThermalLimits #Infrastructure