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The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

(ceodinner.substack.com)
117 points LordAtlas | 4 comments | 07 Dec 25 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.802s | source
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GMoromisato ◴[07 Dec 25 18:57 UTC] No.46184081[source]▶
If energy is indeed the limiting factor here, then maybe the companies building space-based compute (in which energy scales linearly) will remain after the wildfire.

The key is for them to build before the money runs out--I'm not sure they will have enough time.

replies(2): >>46184828 #>>46186709 #
m4rtink ◴[07 Dec 25 20:27 UTC] No.46184828[source]▶
That is a very optimistic scaling assumption - and would almost certainly require substantial in space infrastructure (large scale lunar and asteroid mining and refining, lunar mass drivers, at least solid core nuclear drives) before you can even thin building all the necessary radiators and structural mass.
replies(2): >>46185717 #>>46186208 #
1. GMoromisato ◴[07 Dec 25 22:58 UTC] No.46186208[source]▶
Starlink (collectively) already has 10 times the solar power of ISS, with present-day launch capabilities. If Starship works out (not guaranteed) launch cost should drop to ~$100/kg, which would enable very large constellations.

Musk is planning for 1 megaton/year of satellites, each with 100kW, yielding about 100GW per year.[1]

He thinks they can do that in 4 years, but adjusting for Elon-time, it's probably no less than 8 years, if ever.

But will the AI money last that long? Maybe not.

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[1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1997706687155720229

replies(1): >>46186680 #
2. m4rtink ◴[07 Dec 25 23:54 UTC] No.46186680[source]▶
Sure, it is impressive how much solar power Starlink currently captures, but ISS actually does not get that much - as far as I can tell its about 250 kW maximum even with the new roll-out solar arrays that have been installed quite recently.

So about 2.5 MW of solar potential ? That's indeed quite impressive, but for serious compute a lot of energy needs cooling will eat into that.

replies(1): >>46188212 #
3. GMoromisato ◴[08 Dec 25 04:12 UTC] No.46188212[source]▶
Cooling won’t use much energy because it’s mostly radiators and probably some recirculating pumps.
replies(1): >>46194309 #
4. m4rtink ◴[08 Dec 25 16:32 UTC] No.46194309{3}[source]▶
I think there could be a non trivial ammount of pumping.

Also building all the radiators and structure from in-space resources could be quite substantial energy investment, same with the energy to put it in the final orbit.