The answer to tech's clean energy problem? Put data centres in space

[Celerity]

A start-up founded by a British entrepreneur wants to use Elon Musk’s Starship rockets to take AI chips and solar panels into orbit to generate renewable power

https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/companies/article/the-answer-to-techs-clean-energy-problem-put-data-centres-in-space-6pl9z5zbw

https://archive.ph/cxrNC


Data from Lumen Orbit’s space data centre would be sent back to Earth via Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites

Mark Zuckerberg made waves last month when Meta announced an audacious plan to fund the construction of a fleet of nuclear reactors to power its data centres. A few months before, Microsoft’s boss, Satya Nadella, had said that the $3 trillion tech giant would revive a reactor at the defunct Three Mile Island nuclear power station in Pennsylvania, as part of its effort to find the clean, cheap electricity required to run its artificial intelligence models. Philip Johnston has a better idea. The 38-year-old entrepreneur, from Elstead in Surrey, said they should put their power plants — and data centres — in space.

Johnston runs a start-up called Lumen Orbit, based in Redmond, Washington, which last month raised $11 million (£9 million) to become the first company to put a data centre into orbit. The vision of he and his co-founders — Ezra Feilden, an Imperial College London PhD in materials engineering, and former SpaceX software engineer Adi Oltean — is ambitious. Their design calls for a cluster of shipping container-style boxes packed with high-speed AI chips. These would be anchored at the centre of a 16 sq km array of solar panels generating up to five gigawatts of power — about 25 per cent more than Drax, Britain’s biggest power station. The mammoth structure would circle the Earth in “sun synchronous” orbit so that it is never in shade, and beam data via optical space lasers to Starlink satellites, and then down to Earth.



It may sound like a scheme from a mad scientist — Johnston admitted that plenty of venture capitalists gave him “sideways looks” — but he has run the numbers and reckons that it is not only physically possible, but financially lucrative. And it was another Brit-led company — NFX, a San Francisco venture capital firm founded by Pete Flint, a former lastminute.com executive — that led the financing. Flint said: “It’s a crazy idea, but actually, if you extrapolate down the cost curves, and you don’t want these data centres on Earth, why not put them in space with 100 per cent renewable energy, out of sight?” So how is it possible? The biggest factor is Starship, the 400ft-tall rocket that Elon Musk intends as the workhorse vehicle to move the vast quantities of material and people required to colonise Mars.

The ship is the largest man-made flying object, and SpaceX made history in October when a giant tower with a pair of metal “chopsticks” caught the Starship booster as it returned to Earth. By making the rocket fully reusable, Musk reckons he will reduce the cost to launch material into orbit to as little as $30 per kilo, down from as little as $6,000 today. Fifteen years ago, the cost to send one kilo up on the Space Shuttle was $60,000. “People have no idea what is about to happen in space,” Johnston said. “Asteroid mining is going to be a big business, things like space hotels, manufacturing in space. All of these things become possible when you have low launch costs with huge capacity.” Indeed, SpaceX is in the midst of constructing a Starship “gigafactory” in Texas to build a fleet that could ultimately handle multiple launches a week.

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[rampartd]

1. solves the cooling problem and takes their carbon sasquatch print off planet

let them pay for it with bitcoins.

[ancianita]

2. Yeah, sure. Give Musk complete control over all the data. What could possibly go wrong.

[NNadir]

3. The latest "solar in space" permutation.

This one, like the hydrogen scam, has been around a long time.

Like hydrogen, it never gets young or new; it stays an old idea that never goes anywhere but never quite goes away either, although, like hydrogen, it should go away.

[Wonder Why]

4. Put Musk in space.