Sam Altman fires back at Elon Musk's proposal for space-based data centers, says orbiting data centers 'ridiculous' for now — cites high failure rates and cost as primary limiters

Numerous visionaries, including Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, are thinking about putting AI data centers into orbit to tap into unlimited amounts of power, fewer physical constraints, and the lack of regulations. But while the idea may be worthy in the long-term future, it is "ridiculous" for now, believes Sam Altman, chief executive and co-founder of OpenAI.

"I honestly think the idea with the current landscape of putting data centers in space is ridiculous," said Sam Altman at a press conference hosted by The Indian Express. "It will make sense someday, but if you just do the very rough math of launch costs relative to the cost of power we can do on Earth, to say nothing of how you are going to fix a broken GPU in space, and they do break a lot still, unfortunately. We are not there yet."

Indeed, it costs $5.6 million to launch 1,764 pound (800kg) into low Earth orbit (LEO) using a SpaceX rocket, though for those who plan to launch tens of tons, the price per kilogram will probably come down. Still, one of Nvidia’s NVL72 GB200 rack-scale solutions weighs from 3,000 to 3,245 pounds (1,360 to 1,472kg), depending on the exact configuration, without data center-scale connectivity, cooling, and power infrastructure. Even with discounts, launching data centers into space is still extremely expensive today, so it is unclear whether it can make economic sense any time soon.

"There will come a time — space is great for a lot of things," Altman added. "Orbital data centers are not something that is going to matter at scale this decade."

Radiation-hardened components required

While launching hardware into space is expensive, there must first be hardware to launch. Leading-edge process technologies — such as TSMC’s N4 (4nm-class) — used to build leading-edge AI accelerators like Nvidia’s B200/B300, advanced CPUs, sophisticated DPUs, and network processors are not radiation-hardened, meaning that they cannot survive in space. Yet radiation-hardened fabrication technologies tend to be rather outdated (think 90nm), so before space-worthy computational hardware emerges, new process technologies must be developed.

In addition to space-worthy microelectronics, the industry must also develop space-worthy cooling systems and power generation technologies that are capable of powering millions of AI accelerators. Companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin are probably closer to developing such infrastructure than traditional companies specializing in terrestrial data centers, which is perhaps why Musk and Bezos are so vocal about orbital data centers today, even if they are not going to become viable for at least a decade from now.

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