Summarizer

> the useful lifespan of the gpus in 4-6 years. Sooo what happens when you need to upgrade or repair? Average life of starlink satellite is around 4-5 years

damn. at this point its not even about a pretense for progress, just a fetish for a very dirty space

They re-enter and burn up entirely. Old starlinks don't stay in space.

So they pollute the upper atmosphere instead!

Same that happens with Starlink satellites that are obsolete or exhausted their fuel - they burn up in the atmosphere.

> Sooo what happens when you need to upgrade or repair? The satellite deorbits and you launch the next one.

so, instead of recycling as many components as possible (a lot of these GPU have valuable resources inside) you simply burn them up. I'm guessing the next argument in the chain will be that we can mine materials from asteroids and such?

Such a waste of resources

That is a fun thought experiment, as we wouldn't want to manufacture too far away from earth we may still be within the earth's atmosphere. I wonder what effect dumping greenhouse gases into the very upper levels of the atmosphere would have in comparison to doing it lower down. My assumption is it would eventually sink to a lower density layer, having more or less the same impact.

And what happens every time a rack (or node) fails? Does someone go out and try to fix it? Do we just "deorbit" it? How many tons per second of crap would we be burning in the upper atmosphere now? What are the consequences of that? How do the racks (or nodes) talk to eachother? Radios? Lasers? What about the Kessler Syndrome? Not a rocket scientist but 100% agree this sounds like a dead end.

Communication is a well-understood problem, and SpaceX already has Starlink. They might need pretty high bandwidth, but that's not necessarily much of a problem in space. Latency could be a problem, except that AI training isn't the sort of problem where you care about latency. I'd be curious where exactly they plan to put these datacenters... In low Earth orbit they would eventually reenter, which makes them a pollution source and you'd have no solar power half the time. Parking them at the Earth-Sun L1 point would be better for solar power, but it would be more expensive to get stuff there.

I'm all for efficiency, but I would think a hailstorm of space junk hits a lot harder than one of ice out on the farm. Except it doesn't melt like regular hail so when further storms come up you could end being hit by the same hail more than once :\

I wonder what the plan is to recycle those. Without a plan to safely bring back all this hardware and recycling it, we'll deplete earth from it's mineral. The matter used to build things on earth stays within earth's ecosystem. Moving matter out continusously at industrial scale with no plan to bring 100% of it back in the ecosystem other than burning it seems quite unsustainable and irresponsable.

Doesn't this risk some unforeseen effects on Earth or the rest of the solar system at that scale? Disruption of magnetic shield, some not yet known law of physics suddenly getting felt etc.?

Nice article, the first one. I hope they try it, burn many billions of cash, and then fail. I also hope they don't spread radioactive material across the whole atmosphere when failing, though.

It's not like launching stuff into space doesn't have pushback, either. See: starlink satellites.