SpaceX Orbital Data Centers
Orbital AI is the key to the high frontier
SpaceX uses AI across a broad range of applications, to reduce personnel workload and increase productivity. While Elon Musk was once opposed to AI, he has now committed to explore its full potential.
“I resisted AI for too long. Living in denial. Now it is game on. @xAI @Tesla @SpaceX” ~ Elon Musk/X
Currently SpaceX has relatively minor compute power compared to big players like OpenAI, Amazon and Google, although they can rent computer time from Tesla and xAI. Intriguingly SpaceX intend to fill this gap with their next generation of Starlink satellites, and effectively create the first orbital data center.
“[There has been a lot of debate about the viability of data centers in space.] Simply scaling up Starlink V3 satellites, which have high speed laser links, would work. SpaceX will be doing this.” ~ Elon Musk/X
Each Starlink V3 satellite can download 1 Tbps and upload 160-200 Gbps, so has considerable compute capacity onboard. More significantly they intend to deploy ~30,000 V3 satellites, each equipped with numerous processors, which should provide comparable compute power to any AI center on Earth.
Challenges of Space AI
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