Business ability, ok. Engineering? I've seen no evidence to date musk has engineered anything in his life, unless you count zip2

Roughly 60 individual cars have been identified in Austin and all have a human driver on board.

I don't really buy that there's 250 in SF

So how big are you proposing the solar panel be to be able to provide 1GW to the GPUs? Nearly a square kilometer? With an additional 3 square kilometers of radiators?

Yeah doesn't sound particularly feasible, sorry. Glad you know all the math though!

I made an example calculation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867402

For a 230 kW cluster: 16 x DGX (8x)B200; we arrived at a 30m x 30m solar PV area, and a 90 meter distance from the center of the solar array to the tip of the pyramid.

1 GW = 4348 x 230 kW

sqrt(4348)= ~66

so launch 4348 of the systems described in the calculation I linked, or if you insist on housing them next to each other:

the base length becomes 30 m x 66 = 1980 m = ~ 2 km. the distance from center of square solar array to the tip of the pyramid became 6 km...

any of these systems would need to be shipped and collected in orbit and then assembled together.

a very megalomaniac endeavor indeed.

The radiators are full of ammonia, they would be the heaviest thing involved. Thousands of gallons of ammonia would have to be launched into space.

Actually all of those things agree with the same laws that dictate why data centers can't work in space.

Your examples prove our case. You just must not understand how they work

Have you heard of cosmic radiation?

Cosmic rays take time to destroy them.

It's not only about destruction. It's also about reliability. Without proper shielding and error correction you're going to have lots and lots of reliability issues and data corruption. And if we're talking about AI and given the current reliability problems of the Nvidia hardware, plus the radiation, plus the difficulty for refrigerating all that stuff on space... That's a big problem. And we still haven't started to talk about the energy generation.

I think there's a very interesting use case on edge computing (edge of space, if you wanna make the joke) that in fact some satellites are already doing, were they preprocess data before sending back to Earth. But datacenter-power-level computing is not even near.

I have no idea and numbers to back it up, but I feel it would be even easier to set up a Moon datacenter than an orbital datacenter (when talking about that size of datacenter)

Probably shouldn't speak to the brilliance of xAI engineers when you've never heard of their work

Is whatever that is their work?

There is absolutely nothing realistic about power transmission from space to earth, wired or wireless.

We have these things called batteries, you charge them during the day, and drain them at night.

A solar+battery setup is already cheaper than a new gas plant. Beaming power from space is absolutely asinine, quite frankly. The losses are absurd, the sun already does it 24/7, and we know how to make wires and batteries to shuffle the sun's power around however we need to. Why on earth would we involve satellites?