this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
842 points (98.5% liked)

Technology

85870 readers
4244 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
842
Anybody Who Thinks Orbital Data Centers are a Good Idea Is Suffering from AI Psychosis, Experts Argue (tech.yahoo.com)
submitted 1 day ago by Some_Emo_Chick@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
260 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] CorvusVolvens@infosec.pub 4 points 5 hours ago

I agree, that this is at the moment not a viable thing and especially the SpaceX "concept" is complete bullshit.

I do not agree with some of your points, since they are solved/irrelevant (e.g. "regular maintenance", "low latency") or could be overcome with reasonable tech advances (e.g. "rockets prohibitively expensive", "radiation shielding").

Let me steelman the argument a bit with this single bit of - sadly forgotten - "super cool and innovative tech": "Underwater data center", like project Natick (Microsoft) or the Chinese project:

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/chinas-hicloud-launches-wind-powered-underwater-data-center-targets-500mw-subsea-deployment/

Soooooo, if we will ever see something other than our current land based data centers, we will see millions of ocean data centers, before we will ever see a single commercial space data center.

Reasons:

  • Delivery is super cheap (in comparison to space) at scale, thanks to the already existing wind farm infrastructure
  • Weight is not an issue
  • Cooling is solved
  • Maintenance is not necessary, but replacement is. Easy on scale, because modular.
  • No radiation shielding necessary
  • Connection: data cable = no extra lag or quantity limit

Oh, and by the way, it is still not clear if even ocean data center will be viable. Just found this ๐Ÿ˜‚

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/spacexs-orbital-data-centers-could-face-same-hurdles-microsofts-abandoned-2026-04-01/