[1]: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/neuromancer-count-zero-mona...

The first time around it was also about showing off US might. I don't think that something has changed much. Maybe wild Musk's lies are the only thing that was added.

Well, yeah but that's just Elon being Elon. At this point I think even the most pro-Elon folks freely admit "The first rule of Elon is: 'Ignore everything he says about timeframes and scale.'"

Is a good start

I never said it did. My post didn't even mention SpaceX, Elon or XAI. I just shared that my initial drive-by opinion on space-based compute, as a general concept (regardless which company does it, when or how), was reflexively dismissive but after a tiny bit of research, it's now risen to the lofty epistemic level of "not completely ridiculous." And I discovered it's a much more interesting and complex question than I assumed, involving highly uncertain estimates of rapidly evolving technology, physics and economics.

For me the question starts more akin to "could a Dyson sphere ever be viable for human civilization in this solar system" than "should grandma invest her life savings in SpaceX this afternoon." But it seems some can't reason about the potential future viability of space-based compute independent of current politics, personalities, culture war or whether AI is a bubble inflated by circular deals. To be clear, I do think AI valuations are wildly over-inflated and propped up by financial engineering bordering on fraud likely to trigger a huge economic crash. But it can be simultaneously true that there will be hugely profitable AI businesses in 2035 and it's possible space-based compute might be viable for some company in 2040.

As for Elon, ever since I met him a couple times closer to the Paypal days, I've felt he's an eccentric, impulsive nut but that he's also a savvy, technically-minded entrepreneur with a sharp eye for opportunity who's compelled by obsessive, visionary zeal. And everything he's done since has been consistent with that assessment, from the successes of Tesla and SpaceX to his bizarre, self-destructive detours into politics, social media and AI. I don't understand why so many can't deal with the reality that a person can be deeply flawed and wildly irrational in some ways while simultaneously being highly effective and immensely valuable in other ways. Steve Jobs was a brilliant visionary entrepreneur yet also an asshole in his personal life who believed some crazy shit so deeply it contributed to his early death.

Dude, you realize that right now there are 100+s of data centers in construction around the world often in the 500MW to 1PW range? I.e. there are many, many datacenters (100s) in construction, right now, with 100s of MW up to multiple PW?

Scott's analysis is out by several orders of magnitude!

Everyone knows its "theoretically" possible to have a single server or a single rack in space.

The big and most obvious glaring miss is, how would it be economically viable and operationally viable to have datacenters in space which compete with datacenters on the ground.

We are experts are creating economically profitable (very profitable) datacenters on the ground, which work really well for inference and training, which are cooled really well, can be maintained easily, etc. The idea that we are going to have 100s of MW clusters or 1PW clusters in space, and they are going to be competitive economically, and we are going to be able to maintain them, and they are going to actually WORK (i.e. how will the networking be competitive with datacenters on earth), is frankly laughable.

Scott is totally talking rubbish on this.

Let's do the math on "millions of datacenters" worth of launches.

In fact, let's try and do it for a single 50k GPU datacenter:

50,000 GPUs at GB200 density = 695 NVL72 racks at 1360 kg (1.36 tonnes) each, so the racks are roughly 950 tonnes.

GPUS = 950 tons

85MW of power needed for the GPUs. Latest solar power panels give roughly 120-150 watts per kg. Let's be generous and say 150 W/kg. So 85 MW / 150 W/kg = 570 tonnes of solar arrays

Power = 570 tons

Thermal management (radiators). Real space radiators are around 12 kg/m² for a heavy deployable radiator and its support structure, though ISS radiators are 8 kg per square meter, or 2.75 kg/m² if we only consider the exposed panels. (Using 8 kg/m² for an estimate). 200,000 m² × 8 kg/m² = 1,600 tonnes of radiators

Plus working fluid (ammonia or similar), pumps, manifolds, redundant loops: 150 tonnes.

Radiators Total: 1750 tons.

Structure, Propulsion, Comms, Avionics, Attitude Control Systems, plus Margin. Hard to estimate but conservatively several hundred tons extra. (Actual spacecraft programs always add roughly 20-30% mass margin).

Extras: 750 tons. (being very conservative).

Total = 950+570+1750+750 = 4020 tons.

And note, this is for a single 50k GPU datacenter with all the numbers being skewed to most optimistic.

That would be 40 (!!!) Starship launches. So far we've had 11 launches total with none being successful (100% successful I mean). Each of those launches currently costs 90M dollars. And note, we are assuming a fully working 100 ton payload for Starship of which none of the launches so far have been close to at all.

So our full datacenter to space would cost 3.6B dollars (at current SpaceX prices)... (just to launch it, not to actually buy the equipment). And realistically would cost far more than that...

Note, this is for (by today's standards) a small datacenter with only 50k GPUs and I haven't included any testing, R&D costs, costs of "maintenance", station keeping, replacements, etc etc.

Let alone the question of huge amounts more satellites in orbit, risks of space junk, Kessler syndrome, etc etc.

They beat the US exactly twice, on two very early records - first manmade object and first human in space. Then they fell behind.

Also, the ability to fly without crew and the willingness to have highly visible failures means they can actually exercise the heat shield to understand what works.

I.e. it's not worth it.

The cost of launching 100K servers, each of which needs 20m^2 each of radiator (for a single H200 server), or 250 m^2 for a GB200 rack!

Ok but these numbers are for a single server or single rack, now what about a standard cluster size of like... 50k GPUs?

You would need (with optimal idealized efficiencies) roughly 64000 m^2 of space to cool down your space data-center. That's 9 American football fields of double sided radiator panels! For a single data-center, and realistically there would be inefficiencies and wastage so it could end up more like 20 American football fields of cooling needed.

How's that going to work?

St. George's Cross has long been a symbol of racism in the UK and they've recently been trying to do the same with the union jack.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c626vxyxgj6o

It remains to be seen how efficiently those engineering problems can be solved, but none of the commentators here have any real insight about that (myself included). My money is on the ingenuity of the engineers that are working these problems.

We don't need to proclaim them a success or a failure yet. I don't think they'll be sensible economically for at least several decades, but I welcome the research.

Alternatively, it's not the scale of problem you try and solve fifteen timeslipped minutes and (at least) eighteen months away. We're not even sure what the shape of a solution even looks like, apart from "Generic Future Technology Tree Numbers 4 through 90". Mastery of bioengineering would probably fix it, but it would need to be desktop science, like 3d printing. We are not anywhere near that - mostly because we don't have things like "generic bioreactors" that can grow organisms like a universal womb/seedbed/strata/media.

I recognize human advancement comes with sacrifice. But human advancement also comes with prudent decisions like "don't built the village in the lava".

But guess if you use some sort of fluid in them, you could use a reservoir of it for shielding something.

Going to mars or staying on the moon will be a Darwin Award-level adventure.

It has not been tried commercially yet, so has not failed there, but that is not relevant to my point.

But anyway, conservatively, about 20 tons each, it seems like you could fit at least 5 of these per starship, assuming it's weight and not volume limited. Doesn't seem like fuel's a prohibitive portion of the cost here. But if they can't get it to their no-refurb-between-launches target, then that might be a significant part of the cost.

Governments can change and the next one may be very unfriendly. "Rich gringos/infidels/colonizers are abusing our land sold for sordid money" is a very efficient populist call almost everywhere on the planet.

Elon must have read Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

Just continual tweaks and refinement to keep slimming down the packaging.

If they didn’t you’d be canning them, and you’re canning them anyway.

It feels awfully like you don’t want them trying to roll out new tech at all. Funny take for someone on hacker news to have.

That's basically what the logical conclusion of anti-colonialism or anti-imperialism is. If you don't think your culture is worth spreading, possibly through violence, you can't be very fond of it.

You can't say that the US should return the land to the natives and then say that US culture had a positive influence on north america. It's mutually incompatible.

I would argue that complexities of building Starship are already a solved problem. Boca Chica built a lot more test units than there were (test or production) Apollos and the "factory for rockets, churning them out in regular intervals" part seems to be mastered. They even made three iterations of Raptor, and the third one looks really promising so far.

What is far from perfected is the heat shield and I agree that it is a critical problem.

"it, they can push out the timeline for that further than the original 2026 on Mars goal that they are about to wildly overshoot"

True, but this seems to be ubiquitous in space industry. I am old enough to remember talking about the US going back to the Moon in the 1990s. But the goal, declared by presidents (who have a lot more power at their hands to fulfill it) kept being pushed back and back, always into the next decade, then the next...

If you tolerated it from the government, you should probably tolerate the same from Musk, for the sake of consistency.

Being the first rocket in history where both parts reached the ground ready to land is a pretty good start.

And if Starship can't land then any space datacenters are just as or even more unlikely, so that explaition makes no sense what so ever.

Space is very very unforgiving and they ultimately conclude humanity is better served focusing our resources here on earth first. But the Trekkies have a tough time with that answer because its a bit of a let down.

I assume BO will increase their performance over time, but for now they company is about a decade behind SpaceX.

Nevertheless...

"underdelivery."

Both Falcon and Starlink are quite major improvements over previous status quo. It is not just a question of having a nice WiFi during your flight. If you are interested in some very practical consequences, look at the Russo-Ukrainian war and the role Starlink plays there.

'Brownish stuff', known more generally as natural ecosystems.

> So in the long term, what do you think is cheaper and easier to maintain, upgrade, handle etc.?

How long a term does your imagination stretch to? Are you really arguing that once provisioning, cooling, automated scaling in space, and off-planet mining are all solved problems, that shitting on our planet will still be the cheapest most maintainable option?

Go start yet another "Elon is an idiot because I hate his politics" thread.

Every single satellite has sufficient cooling for its power production, otherwise they would be frying. Waste heat from a GPU is not materially different from waste heat from an amplifier. That's not cooling entire racks, but I don't think anybody talks about putting entire racks in space anymore.

I'm very much pro nuclear, but a solar cell in a sun synchronous orbit is pretty great too and eliminates most battery requirements

I very much doubt the economics of this makes sense, but I don't think a lot of your criticism is valid.

There are now quite a few politicians running on a platform of banning data centre construction projects.

There is zero merit and zero gain from lobbing pole sized object at terrestrial targets, and I blame people having negative understanding of orbital dynamics for the whole concept getting popular in the first place.

Problems are:

1) You pay every single Joule of impact energy (and more!) in rocket fuel for getting the thing up there in the first place, which is an abysmal deal.

2) You can't actually "drop" anything from orbit once its there, you have to accelerate it while being trivially observable (and trackable) from earth by 30 year old radar technology.

3) You could literally do the same thing by launching purely kinetic ballistic missiles at targets. Non one ever does that for a reason-- its difficult, expensive and ineffective at the same time. Basically the only benefit is demonstrating that you could have delivered an actual nuclear payload in the same way.

Dropping steel rods from orbit didn't seem so crazy. But I've never seen a detailed evaluation of the idea.

This orbit has to rotate about a degree every day to follow the terminator as the earth orbits the Sun. It uses the equatorial bulge of the earth to achieve that rotation without have to spend rocket fuel. It is really quite interesting.

1. The twisting and folding of the heart tube is highly dependent on gravity and micro-pressures of circulating blood in the embryo. I learned that from Dr. Larry Taber at Wash U in St. Louis. In microgravity, there's a very strong chance the heart forms incorrectly or if it does form correctly, it conditions itself for zero-g life, so it will have reduced pumping strength because it never needs to move blood from toe to head against gravity. So, even if you gestate a kid correctly in microgravity, the transition to an environment _with_ gravity could be extremely stressful on the body or possibly fatal.

2. Other phases of gestation _depend_ on gravity. The "baby dropping" around the beginning of third trimester is important to kick start the body to prepare for birth. The baby presses on the cervix to stimulate dilation during the process of birth, etc.

We know very very little about the long-term effects of 0.166g on human health, because it's never been done. (best guess: also not good).

In terms of launch cost, Starship makes launch cost negligible. Some estimates are that it will cost less to launch a tonne to orbit, than to ship across the US by train.

Even if this figure is slightly low, that has nothing compared to the cost of real estate, construction costs, all of the building codes required to build a data center on Earth. These things all still apply underground, and underground is going to require additional shoring and structural engineering, to ensure that the structure is not crushed, damaged, and so forth.

Comparing this to scaling the production of compute where they try to work outside the bounds of ASML (~40k employees) and TSMC (~80k+ employees), and where there is a huge number of degrees of freedom in many, many layers of the stack that have complicated interactions.

With radiation and cooling, SpaceX also has plenty of experience with both already given that they've had to solve this on existing satellites. Overall, Terafab just seems like a far harder challenge, and where I'd be more wary on timelines.

And about starlink .. as far as I know the fail quite often but work, because of redundancy. So they get replaced.

If you want to ship GPU's to the orbit, then this surely works somehow, if you are willing to replace them often, which is expensive. Or you shield them, but then you will need to get up heavy shields. In general, of course computers work in space, but it is not cheap.

A data-center no matter where has 100'000s of connections, each connection is a failure point. And things that go on rockets that shake to an insane degree need to have lots of special attention paid to each such connection.

Heating again is 10-100x more difficult in space, again, it could be solved, but again, is it cheaper.

Same for transport, transporting stuff into space is 10-100x more expensive.

Same for lifecycle management, 10-100x more expensive in space. You need fuel and move around avoiding collisions and so on.

Same for mechanical complexity overall, a standard server rack on earth is complex (see Oxide) a 'space server rack' is likely 10x100x more complex.

So basically you have to re-engineer literally everything from the ground up for a new environment.

So the question is what is the argument for why you should bare this cost. The only argument seem to be constant sunlight, and maybe regulatory. Regulatory is not looking like it will be much easier in space, launch alone is a huge regulatory burden.

So really we are comparing setting up enough batteries to survive for a night or getting another constant source of power with all the cost mentioned above. I know what side I would be on.

> active rerouting around dead cores

That still means you have a dead core in your system. All you are saying is 'lets pay even more to launch extra capacity in case part of it fails'. And that goes for every part from the smallest core all the way up to the largest subsystems on the sat.

Or you can just order a replacement when you actually need it, like when you have a data-center on earth.

I recognize that that is distressing to people, hell, it’s been obvious to me since I was at OWS in my 20s. But we are in a new world now and the old rules don’t apply. A company that has the backing of the government to launch their spacecraft will simply do it. You think Texas is going to stop them? Or Florida? Or even California? Of course not.

A lot changes in a world where you can plan things out with AI. A lot changes in a world with abundance. If we play our cards right we could have the culture, but that means letting go of the conservative yearning to put things back to how they were. The old world is 10 light years away now, it wasn’t as great as we remember it and it ain’t coming back.

And if I had to choose, I’d much rather have datacenters in orbit than one burning hydrocarbons loudly 2 blocks from my kids’ school.

We are nowere near any resource limitation on planet earth for AI Datacenters.

Musk sells this story because he has Starship which needs payload to make financial sense. The payload doesn't exist so he inventes DC in Space.

Its the same thing as SpaceX buying Tesla Cybertrucks.

His old colossus datacenter is a 300MW Datacenter he now rents out to Anthropic because he doesn't even need his own compute. Colossus DC is probably 10x cheaper than his whole Space AI DC Story and will be for a long time.

The first line of the post that you are supposedly replying to is:

> Of course it works, the question is how this would look like and if its financial feasable.

Unless is cost-comparable to a data centre on Earth, and I am told that it very much is not, then there is no financial feasibility for space datacentres.

Christ. I thought we had seen the last of the Musk-tards.

You are lucky if you think you are, start on this path you are likely to increasing make choices that tend towards increasing your chances of success(i.e luck).

> For the same money you could spin up a bunch more QRFs and scatter them over the globe.

The argument Space Force could make is this would allow for higher talent density than dispersed QRFs. The same unit could also attack satellites or space stations.

[1] https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2025/12/space-force-specia...

However, in this particular trajectory, SpaceX did build the rockets and did build Starlink which is now the best global-scale wireless communication network for many use-cases. Stretching this trajectory to scale up the technology to facilitate in-space computing is vastly more grounded than Shakespearean monkeys.

If it were only retail investors, your assumptions could make sense.

However plenty of the share ownership is institutional investors. Most of them care a bit more about fundamentals. (I'm ignoring passive investors just using indexes).

Like, it's not "great" but if you're not flying around the sun every 72 minutes or whatever and you can keep your panels sun on and radiate into deep space, the numbers aren't bananas.

"Is It Really Impossible To Cool A Datacenter In Space?" - Scott Manley

tl;dr -> not impossible.

And the Stanford admittance was for materials science, not physics as he lies about

7.8 km/s delta-v, that's quite a lot.

>You're also mysteriously adding in build cost for starship, and not the train. Starship is reusable.

Even if both are reusable a train will last decades and a starship will be lucky to get a few dozen launches, which is still amazing mind you. Maybe it is my lack of imagination but i just can't see how a diesel engine that pulls a metal box at 60mph will cost more per trip than a rocket that has to accelerate to 18000 mph. Even just fueling: a train runs on diesel which is easy to handle and everywhere. Starship requires cryogenic fuel and oxidizer which is inherently more difficult to handle.

Supply runs to Mars will be in the range of 10000x as expensive, possibly even higher. Something that costs $100 to get to Antarctica will cost $1million to get to Mars. Permanent Mars settlement will entail a level of self-sufficiency that we haven't proven on a place that is comparitively balmy and has the benefit of a breathable atmosphere and abundant water (Antarctica). Not to mention radiation...

Don't hold your breath. I'm as much a fan of space colonization of as the next nerd, but it's premature.

None of those are self sustaining.

It isn't... the hostile local government can seize the ssh keys you use to control it and take it over just fine.

The hostile international non-local super power just gained a new ability to jam communications or destroy it with a bit of deniability too.

you mean other than China, russia, NK and Iran?

You're concentrating it into a very small area of compute.

If you don't spread that heat back out, it's going to find a much higher thermal equilibrium than the solar panels themselves would find just absorbing the sunlight and radiating the energy back into space.

It's like you've pointed a magnifying glass at your compute, except with electricity, which means you can reach temperatures higher than you can with a magnifying glass.

If the economics make it too expensive not to use freshwater on Earth, I don't see how closed-loop cooling suddenly becomes affordable in space where dispersing heat is already more difficult.

The Starlink v3 doesn't exist yet in space, it also needs Starship apparently and Musk said it will have the size of a Boeing 737 fully deployed. So it will not be small and its not proofen yet.

A rack with 48u will either have 12 or 24 GPUs which equals to 9kW or 17kW. Than its not 250k satellites for a 'small' 300MW DC but only 25k. Still a very crazy number.

I would love to see all of this scifi stuff happening. Spaceship in space, travel gates, dyson sphere but there is just no current breakthrough in our society which would indicate that this makes sense.

In my opinion, we as a society will have to get rid of capitalism first before we will do the next step and just because Musk needs a story to sell to keep his construct alive, doesn't mean its the right time.

That sort of long run probably has even longer timelines than 75 years, and that's an argument which carries almost zero weight to an investor (particularly relative to the one SpaceX is actually making which is using their launch monopoly to make massive profits meeting 2020s inference compute demand) because by the time it happens, assuming it does, the space market is unrecognisable and they've missed a whole bunch of other hype cycles. The bull case for SpaceX depends a lot on what they deliver by the mid-late 2030s being more than expected rather than less and essentially not at all on the constraints and challenges of next century.

[1]I also hear this thesis every week from my own CTO, but much as some VCs like the passion it's not why people fund us...

The thing is, this is a massive expansion of AI investment. And AI has been the thing where Musk has failed consistently the most. Nothing he has done around AI indicates he has some special genius or insight.

The thing he had success with were things that were known to be good ideas, reusable rockets, electric cars and space based LEO communications. What he did is he brought together the finances and build a and lead a team to execute on them.

However, we are far away from that with xAI and Space data-centers.

SpaceX immediately responded by lowering its target orbits by 70km, the maximum it could legally do without renegotiating formally.

When a high orbit develops Kessler Syndrome, the billions of pieces of debris rain down on lower orbits and cause cascading collisions there, and they keep doing it for centuries.

Not understanding how any of this works, the scientists not being capable of convincing the politicos, or the leaders not being able to escape their local maxima of public stances to recognize a real threat, is a massive, civilizational level hubris. This is pass/fail - the math does not care about our level of understanding or maturity.

This 1 Trillion Dollar has to be translated to either sending up A LOT of foreign payload OR his payload; All of this payload = new Satelites. Its not like we are sending earth resource up in space to build a dyson sphere.

It would likely cost bare minimum 10-100 billion dollars to put a few boots on the ground on Mars, how could we possibly build cities there within the end of the decade?

We are better off at this stage of human civilization to look at building resiliency and redundancy at home. Settling margins of Earth in places like Antarctica, underground, under water is many orders of magnitude simpler than Mars, provides useful models for distant future space colonization, and also provides us with some of the civilizational redundancy and resiliency many space-colony-enthusiasts are looking for.

So what kind of laws would lead to the orbital option being preferred over the ground-based clean option?

Optimizing for local circumstances is a benefit to doing things on earth: if having a production line and the ability to plug into wherever energy happens to be cheapest was better we'd all be sticking inference chips in shipping containers and not worrying about HVACs being relatively inefficient at cooling.

But to make sense, it needs to be cheaper than on earth, and that seems unrealistic.

The satellites built by SpaceX so far, and their engines, are quite unlike most previous space engineering due to these reasons. Given the undeniable success they've had in building Starlink, with each version growing considerable in size, I just don't see which engineers would be able to fully rule out the math that SpaceX might be working on here, exactly because there are so many parts of the total equation and where SpaceX are moving outside the previous design envelopes in many dimensions.

Of course I'm personally not convinced or able to know whether this is economically sensible - I just believe it's very difficult to fully rule out given the track record of SpaceX - and given that there doesn't appear to be any singular insurmountable thing that needs to be figured out here. Hence why I said in my original post that this is why I'm excited to see the design space explored.

What is the offensive launch that can destroy 60 000 satellites in one mission? I don't think it exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#:~...

> It is made of non-replaceable parts

Every part of the ISS is replaceable if you want to.

> it only has very limited life support supplies on board (month scale)

I still don't see why self-sustainability is a part of being "permanent".

Grandparent is trying to argue that a lot of smart people working quietly on something confers plausibility upon the premise of their work (i.e., "they must know something you don't"). I've rebutted with two examples showing that large numbers of smart people working on something don't make plausible a premise that is obviously flawed for other reasons [*].

[*] (ETA) and is known at the time by the smart people.

No, the ISS never was permanent. It had a limited lifespan from the outset. It's actually beyond the original 15-year life. But it is not indefinite.

> The ISS was originally intended for a 15-year mission, but the mission has been repeatedly extended due to its success and support

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#En...

> My house won't be around forever, I would still call it a permanent

That's true, in the sense that "A word means whatever I choose it to mean". If you were in a flat in an apartment building scheduled for demolition in 2030, would you call that "permanent housing" ?

When people say "you don't lose that much power on the ground", it's in the context of cost.

So a solar panel is 5x more efficient in space. You solve that in the ground by buying 5x more solar panels.

Solar panels cost -- rounding up -- $10/kg.

Lifting things into space costs -- rounding down -- $1000/kg.

For the same amount of money, you can put 100X solar panels into a ground based array as a space based array. You don't lose that much power on the ground. You aren't overcoming that difference because solar panels are more efficient in space.

Launches need permission too.

> And you're using words like "should" - should has no place in this discussion. It's an "is-ought" thing. You're saying "they should behave this way" and I'm saying, "they're going to behave this other way."

My "should" is a summary of the incentives if they acted reasonably. Without a crystal ball, don't be so confident they'll do something different.

And here's a version with no is or ought: Anyone whose goal is avoiding datacenter downsides, that could say "we forbid polluting and power grid draining datacenters here" but chooses to say "we forbid any datacenters here, go to space", is a moron. And anyone that doesn't have the power to say either is irrelevant.

> You haven't reasoned through any of this, you're saying that they "should" do something because it will be cheaper/better/whatever. And that's not how it works - it was never how it worked, but it was less obvious in prior times.

Companies almost always do what's cheaper. Your logic is incomprehensible here.

> There aren't really any better options. Your bottlenecks are power, land costs, technical stuff, and bureaucracy. In space you basically shortcut all of those problems except the technical ones

If the satellites self-powering counts as not buying electricity, then so does self-powering on land. Land in the middle of nowhere is very cheap, and so is the bureaucracy per acre when you're buying large chunks. It's less bureaucracy than rocket launches. And the technical stuff is a lot simpler on land than in space; suggesting you avoid technical stuff by using rockets is crazy.

> Sure you "could" build data centers in Arizona or whatever, but they're not going to because they'd have to ask permission, it'd be a permitting nightmare, etc.

A baseless claim.

When you're happy with the middle of nowhere, building on land only requires a handful of approved sites on the entire planet. That's very achievable, and achievable faster than it takes to set up the production lines.

https://wlockett.medium.com/the-spacex-xai-merger-is-a-giant...

But to you're point here, I disagree with this take:

> I think most people would allow a datacenter that isn't using electricity from the grid, isn't consuming water, and isn't polluting the air or with noise. Am I wrong to think that?

This may be uncharitable of me, but I don't think people will. People in the states generally hate AI. Hate it. And, frankly, most people don't know how any of this stuff works. They don't know how the inference gets done and they couldn't care enough to try to learn it. It's kind of like the meme "keep your government hands off my medicaid" that was going around a few years back. People just... totally don't get it and will hate what they hate. Even the people I agree with politically often are absolutely unable to envision anything other than the status quo. People can't even begin to imagine a world where there is no obligation or requirement to work. We could build that world and free ourselves from the tyranny of scarcity, but we're going to need AI to help, and the transition (what we're going through now) is going to be rocky.

Even now you can find people on here who say, "AI gets everything wrong" etc. People will fight musk building something simply because it is Musk. No other reason is needed. People don't actually give a damn about the environment. (this has been hard for me to swallow as an environmentalist at heart, even if I did work for an oil company for a bit). I learned this when I was doing some flying to some mines most directly. Which mines get opposed in the popular press? The mine that happened to be close to a place where a wealthy bank/family had property (a family lodge) that could be wrecked if the rivers got polluted. A hundred or two nautical miles away the same story was playing out with another piece of earth. That mine was unopposed because... well, nobody wealthy gave a damn and the people who inhabited the villages around it were poor. Why do people talk about ANWR like it's some sort of glorious beautiful location of resplendent natural beauty? Because someone said it once, and they're more stochastic parrot-like than the AI lol. I've been up there, lived up there, etc. I'd much rather we protected a few other places (especially some extraordinarily beautiful places that have been absolutely devastated by logging, but I digress), just saying, and ain't nobody going to go up there and spend time up there unless they need to for work.

That is more or less the level of engagement and understanding I expect people to have about this stuff. They read a few Musk tweets, thought, "good lord what a train wreck" (which is largely the right takeaway, to be fair), and will now oppose everything he does, even if it is actually something is probably good for the world. Generally, people don't care about where things come from, how their food gets here, the logistics, etc. I'm being overly broad, obviously some people care, but the amount is far smaller than you'd think, and largely, people will oppose datacenters in America because it is popular to oppose datacenters in America presently. It wouldn't matter if it was a datacenter dedicated to curing cancer and ending world hunger that was entirely sourced from green and conflict-free minerals, you'd have a non-trivial amount of people opposing it.

Now for this: >The way I look at it, land for the actual datacenter isn't a delay. Start that permitting at an appropriate time in your process and it'll be done before you're actually ready to build.

This is right in the "old world" way of thinking about it. Like, if this was the problem 5 years ago, this would be totally right. However, today these guys all view this as a race to AGI and more realistically ASI. If I had effectively infinite money (and Musk basically does), and I wanted to start building a datacenter in here in Alaska, if I built in town it could be 4-8 months to approve the permitting for construction. Double that timeline down south in more desirable parts of the country or with adequate infrastructure. If I'm in a race to build a datacenter as fast as possible, 4-8 months is billions of dollars on the back end when you're being your opposition.