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New insult just dropped
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2026
935 points (98.6% liked)
Enough Musk Spam
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Wtf Teslas are good cars? Debatable. But how does that make Elon a good engineer? He is the hype man and has absolutely nothing to do with the engineering of the cars.
They are right about the whole datacenters in space thing tho. Getting power and losing heat is very hard in space. And we're not even talking about the effects of radiation on the hardware, the depreciation making ROI impossible and the added costs of getting it up there. Literally the exact same hardware but on the ground instead of space would make more money. Not to mention the latency and unable to repair or upgrade anything. Anyone who's ever been to a datacenter knows those things have people coming and going all the time, they require maintenance. And calling it a datacenter is beyond ridiculous, even if they launch the biggest sat ever made, it wouldn't even have a fraction of what a small modern data center can provide. Just going bigger isn't a simple thing at all, transporting heat and power around is hard. And materials have limits, a solar panel can only be so large before natural oscillations shake the thing apart.
The only thing datacenters in space do is keep SpaceX in business, which is something Elon wants, so for him they are great. For the rest of the world, not so much. There is zero reason for any compute to be in orbit.
And Musk could have easily scored big points if he invested heavily into solar panels combined with the battery tech they already have. If those datacenters would provide energy instead of taking it away, that's at least one concern less. And even if the whole AI thing collapsed and the datacenters became useless, they would still make good solar farms and energy storage. If they would help stabilize the grid with their batteries, getting a connection to the grid wouldn't be as big of an issue. But instead they chose the worst fucking option, gas powered turbines for local energy production. Bad for the environment, making lots of noise and local pollution plus driving up the cost of fuel. At least they aren't building coal plants, but it's close.
And the only solar Musk ever promoted was a total scam, nothing of what he told investors about those solar roofs was true. And not of it ever worked, the whole thing was non-functional. How Musk isn't in jail for that or one of the many other times he lied to investors is a mystery to me. Oh no it's not, he has money and laws don't apply to rich people, my bad.
Solar is already being installed anywhere they can. Getting a connection to the grid isn't that easy, and often requires paying for the transmission and distribution upgrades needed - which also get implemented on a timescale to suit the grid operator, ie in no rush, whenever they're good and ready.
Battery storage wouldn't last long enough and would require a much larger footprint than turbine generators. However the turbines are more expensive to run than importing from the grid - they're for security of supply, not for constant operation (although I'm sure they'd happily run them if no grid connection was available).
Point being I don't think there is a practical option where data centres could export to the grid - they already install solar on the roof, and it isn't that big of an area (big solar farms take up a ton of space). With wind turbines you have to worry about ice throw, so they can't be too close. Whatever option it's basically a separate installation with its own land acquirement and planning permission needs.
The one reason I can think of is to lower Starlink latency by around 1-2ms to whatever services they're providing if you're connecting directly to the satellite that does the compute, but I'd struggle to come up with many actual use cases for that there where the juice is worth the squeeze.
I can see why he'd want it since there'd be a lot of cross-sell opportunities there, i.e. use Starlink if you want lower latency to our hosted servers, and use our hosted servers if you want Starlink subscribers to have lower latency to your service. Maybe the point isn't to put a giant warehouse of supercomputers there, it's just to get enough to run a bunch of Counter-Strike 2 and TURN servers. But that's speculation on my part, I've no idea what the dozy bellend is actually thinking.