Oracle cannot possibly be expecting to meet its bets here. My own empirical one-person observation is that my friend worked there in the group that went around the world standing up their new cloud datacenters, and he was there from basically 2019 to earlier this year. They laid him and half his team off earlier this year. Absolutely nonsensical if they're really building out cloud data centers. Because that's exactly what his job was for the previous 5 years....
Can anyone make that make sense? The team was like 15 people and is now 7. Not exactly a large enough team to build out billions of dollars worth of data centers... Maybe they're just going to contract that all out, but this guy and his team were a very smooth, very well greased machine for standing this stuff up quickly and reliably.
From my limited second-hand understanding of orcl, a team that operates in a smooth and well greased manner is quite the anomaly. I could see why the company would have an immune response to it.
Very unlikely to be the technical build team at fault for that.
Real estate, legal, permitting, utility connections, construction, plant fit out, testing and certification, security, customs and immigration, and shipping all need to happen first - and every one of those has room for huge amounts of uncertainty and delay, more so if you're doing it internationally.
There aren't many shortcuts that you can take when you're dealing with a complex combination of hardware, property, and law.
Technical staff are easiest to pin the blame on in any given situation. All those other fields require enormously more people skills and political inclination.
If you are in an org like that and there is an effort to pin something on technical people inappropriately the reaction when there's solid push back approaches total hysterical breakdown since it's so unexpected. Even if the tech staff "win" they'll be marked for the rest of their time there.
That matches my experience at google. Getting the land and approvals was the most time, then the basic site prep and building shells and utilities, then basic building fit out, and then finally the actual tech installs.
The real way to increase throughput is to first slow down and smooth out the inevitable bumps by adding adequate slack and building up an inventory of shovel-ready projects as a buffer - and then to start running multiple teams in parallel.
The fact that OP's friend experienced Oracle doing the exact opposite of this lends credence to the idea that they're under pressure and are perhaps panicking.
Well I guess we can assume that this means it's not the reason senior leadership laid them off because senior leaders definitely never scapegoat their underlings or have too little competence to correctly assess why things failed!
yes but sometimes a VP gets fired, new VP comes in, and says "we'll outsource this" or "we'll use this home grown team doing something else" and unfortunately tons of people are caught in a layoff, even if they were good.
Oracle is increasingly looking like the Lehman Brothers of the AI boom. One day it will all go pop and the cards will start crumbling elsewhere in the industry.
Larry’s son runs paramount now, and given he’s driving it to become the next Fox News challenger, it’s a given the current admin will give them a sweet heart deal.
And seems like he has been forcing migrations to Oracle Cloud into at least some of the daughter companies he has bought, even when they've been having way more problems. OCI needs some clients to fill data centers!
Yeah, but they'll need to time their bust for before Jan next year. There is a significantly lower chance of a Democratic congress being as sympathetic.
They'll just spin some divisions off and/or sell the DC's they have to Anthropic or others at a profit. They could also just rent compute out at insane margins. They aren't going anywhere.
For 50 years the idea of selling used hardware and hardware facilities at a profit was a joke. If it is not a joke again in under 10 years then the overall economics of the world are going to be the joke and it will be a very dark one.
Except for the part where Oracle is so deeply embedded into the US government, and Larry Ellison is connected enough that they will be granted any and all bailouts necessary to prevent this (while everyone pretends not to notice that such bailouts are socialism)
Interviewed there early in my career. The vibe was very much off. Ran into the same vibe many years later when a company that acquired a company I founded got bought by Computer Associates. Places where doing good work and making good things seemed way down the list of priorities. I get the feeling I was pitied for naïveté.
I have to assume so, sadly. Peers have said my preference towards quality over quantity is why I haven't "launched" [ahead of them? unclear]... as if they're nicely retired with drinks on the beach, or something. Completely blind to the fact that our priorities differ and, well, reality/status.
From what I can tell, the DC buildout isn't going that well. I've been wondering about the current status of the projects because there hasn't been much in the news or here about new DC's coming online. This report summary makes the point that getting power to the datacenters with onsite generation is running into roadblocks from permitting to even finding turbines to buy. He who shouldn't be named (here) made the same point in an interview that popped up on my youtube feed while pitching the datacenters-in-spaaaace angle. Software people are getting a lesson on the difficulties of utility scale power hardware.
If Oracle can't acquire power generation for their WI facilities they've been asleep. Generac is based out of WI and rapidly expanding their manufacturing footprint to match DC demand. Connect the dots to political lobbying and tax breaks to one of the biggest local businesses in an now-recovering manufacturing state to secure generation equipment. A year ago Oracle could've bought Generac outright for less than some of these flailing partnerships they've done.
The idea that we can’t get enough electrical power on earth because of supply constraints, but that we can solve that by launching the datacenters and their entire support infrastructure into space makes no sense unless you’re a huckster trying to pump up your space launch business ahead of an IPO. There’s no way we are more constrained on land-based solar+battery equipment than we would be on space-worthy solar+battery+space-cooling equipment plus sufficient launch infrastructure and resources. Meanwhile, our government is paying companies to stop building wind power and bombing sources of natural gas.
sheesh i didn't say a datacenter-in-space was a good/feasibnle idea. The point i was making is I feel that building power plants to power a datacenter is turning out to be harder than software people realize and multi-year (or worse) delays likely the result.
Space DC make sense when local governments and communities don't want DC built on Earth. Space DC is an engineering and finance problem, not a problem in legal/permission, real estate, power generation, grid delivery, environmental, etc.
>a less hard problem to solve than bribing a few local governments
Wouldn't it be best if the data centers were just... good neighbors? Like everyone talking about illegal bribes and impossible moonshots when the answer is just don't suck?
We are well past the point of these companies caring about their reputations. People are already losing their homes over this. Here is Penguinz0's commentary on a news report of GA Power eminent domaining someone's home to run a power line through it to power a data center.
The general problem is that we've made construction suck for a while now and people are suddenly paying attention to it but only in the case of data centers.
You don't get caught paying bribes if government officials aren't accepting bribes. The problem is the governments have been operating in a mode where blocking everything is the default and paying bribes is the expected way for things to get approved.
The issue with this is that datacenters are inherent "suck" machines. It takes a lot more effort and cost for them to not suck then for them to suck, so "sucking" is part of their core design.
Up till recently, they were a rare enough object that distressed communities still saw the glitz and glam that they are sold with as valuable. Now that brutalist assholes are trying to jam them in every nook and cranny of the earth, word is getting out and people aren't buying it anymore.
There have been some attempts to try floating or water immersed data centers that mitigate or at least hide some of their suckiness, but these were hard and costly, so the incentives weren't there to do them anyway. Maybe now those ideas will resurface and improve, but I expect "bribe, con or sue rural community to destroy their quality of life" is still cheaper and easier.
You still need to build the power infrastructure to the rural areas. Build the infrastructure for the people, like roads, sewage, water, buildings, etc. Navigate the regulation and permit processes.
The space required to install enough solar panels, especially in the places these things are going (like Ohio, where it's NOT ideal for solar generation), would far, far outsize the data center itself by a significant magnitude.
If only data centers had some kind of backup systems to prevent power interruptions, like inverters with batteries attached to them. They could call it an Uninterruptible Power Supply and then charge the batteries when other power is available and run on them when it isn't.
Anything using 1GW of power is going to be "enormously expensive". The all-in cost of a 1GW data center is on the order of $50 billion. A billion dollars in storage batteries is ~2% of the cost, which is completely reasonable.
~1600 GWh of lithium batteries are produced each year and hundreds of GWh/year of production capacity have been added in each of the last few years, so ~12 GWh isn't going to upend the market.
If grid storage batteries are economical in the general case then why wouldn't they be doubly so in a place where the inverters are a sunk cost and you're saving the transmission costs because the load is at the same site as the batteries?
The competition isn't the cost of generators, it's the cost of grid power, or the cost of operating gas generators every day.
They aren't economical in the general sense. They are economical to provide frequency stabilization, grid efficiency, and maybe a few hours of demand shifting. They're not yet economical to store solar power during the day and discharge it at night. We are getting closer but I don't think we are quite yet there.
As far as I can work out, the cost is competitive as long as you're using the capacity every day, especially when it lets you avoid paying transmission costs. The thing that doesn't work is to have enough battery storage to handle extended periods of low generation, because for that you need dramatically more storage capacity while only using the surplus on rare occasions. But a data center could use the grid or backup generators on those rare occasions while still using batteries overnight every night.
It takes 2.5 million solar panels to generate 1GW of electricity assuming 400W per panel and direct sunlight. 2.5M times 18 sq ft per panel is about 1000 acres or ~1.55 sq mi.
That would work for a 1 GW data center, during the day, without clouds, during the summer.
The US gov't owns at least 50% of every state in the west. Or they could just build in the middle of bum f*ck Texas and get fossil and renewables. Too bad Texas' grid is so piss poor
Sending to LEO costs around $2,700 usd and 9kWh of fuel per kilogram.
If you manage to send a data center with high end processing units, large array of solar panels, even larger liquid cooling and tick shielding against solar rays you’d have spent probably 100x to 1000x the cost of an equivalent earth data center even without considering hardware deprecation.
You’re better off sinking your data center deep in the sea and even that is probably not happening at large scales.
I tried to find what the worst option is other than putting them in space and you can do a lot! Trucking diesel to the middle of the Sahara is a decent option in comparison to space.
Oh, well, if the CEO of a company who only exists to try to convince people it is possible says it's possible on a podcast hosted by a VC firm who also wants to convince people it is possible so they can make their money back then it must be!
I've always wondered who is gullible enough to even bother watching this kind of garbage, thank you for answering that question.
Space data centers are an intrinsically cool idea, and honestly I hope we see at least one for the sheer marvel of such a project. But to be cost efficient, it has to be cheaper than rural US, cheaper than buying some island, cheaper than setting it up on a converted freighter ship and tanking the fuel in, etc.
BUT once Earth has a fully paid off space elevator the unit economics will make sense, or if we have orbital space factories and don't have any lift costs, etc. It's all possible, but at a 50 year+ timescale and immense investment. All of which I hope for because I'd like to see more space development and exploration.
How do the laws of physics allow it? How do you disperse the heat? How do you protect your compute from cosmic rays? How do you get enough solar up there without catastrophic damage from micrometeorites?
I think the company that has managed to launch and currently operates ~10k satellites can figure those out. Still remains to be seen if the economics make sense, but with increased "anti" stuff happening all around (some of which surely is manufactured) who knows? 5 - 10 years from now things might change.
On Earth it has to be fossil fuels. With solar you can't do it. I haven't done the calculations myself so, full disclosure, AI work ahead. But I asked GPT 5.6 how big a solar and battery farm would have to be to power a one gigawatt datacenter such that it could ride out a few cloudy days in a row (this is far below the reliability bar).
Its answer is you'd need an "absurdly large battery" and a solar farm of over 100 square kilometers, quite possibly up to over 200 square kilometers. And it would need to be built in the desert.
Also, normal utility scale LiON battery sites are only meant to provide stabilization services for hours, not days.
The problem is you have to overspec the solar farm quite a lot because it must not only be able to power a one gigawatt facility, but also generate more than that so it can recharge the battery packs during the day too.
So this just doesn't work. You think datacenter permitting is bad when it only requires some on-site gas turbines? Imagine the difficulty of getting a 200 square kilometer solar farm over the finishing line.
No, it's quite possible Elon is going to win this one. Regulation is expensive! He can just fire a constant stream of satellites into space. The constellation needed to provide a gigawatt of inferencing would be about the same size as today's Starlink system, well within the bounds of what he's proven can be done.
The threat to space based datacenters isn't really the physics of it. It's the risk of a bubble pop that temporarily craters demand and/or an overbuild of terrestrial capacity. Outside of the software industry we don't see huge new blocks of inferencing demand, and OpenAI at least doesn't seem capacity constrained at all right now.
Why restrict yourself to 100% solar? Solar augmented by grid is pretty great.
Also, you very conspicuously avoided talking about the difficulty/impact of a 1GW datacenter in space. One might suspect your motives aren't as impartial as you seem to think.
The whole problem is difficulty getting grid connections on Earth. If you can just hook up to the grid then why not just use it for everything.
I don't have any motives, what are you talking about? I don't own SpaceX stock if that's what you're thinking.
What's the difficulty of a 1GW datacenter in space? The number of satellites it requires seems to be within the realm of what SpaceX has already achieved. If the calculations are wrong, by all means say so, I haven't checked them.
> What's the difficulty of a 1GW datacenter in space?
Simple back of the envelope calculations?
Let's assume your numbers are correct and that panels in space can generate 10x the power per square meter per 24 hour period (due to efficiency, lack of night, and lack of atmosphere/weather). That means 10 KM^2 are needed for one such data center. The largest we've built in space is ~3,000 M^2 on the ISS. So one of these DCs in space will require an array ~3,000 times the size of the largest we've built before. Or, it's going to require ~3,000 satellites, each with an array the size of the largest we've ever deployed.
The largest Starlink satellites currently deployed generate less than 30 KW each. We'd need more than 30,000 of those to generate this much power. Starlink has launched ~12,500 to date, with ~10,000 still functioning. So 3x the size of the functioning fleet that's taken 8+ years to deploy. Currently, we are deploying well under 5,000 per year. Let's assume we can come up with enough spare capacity to launch 5,000 per year. That's 6 years to deploy the first 1GW DC. By the time we get to 1GW, the average GPU is 3 years old. So we need to continue to deploy 5,000 satellites per year to maintain 1GW of GPUs that are, on average, 3 years behind current generation GPU designs.
This is all before we get to the economics of launching, the cost of the satellites themselves, heat dissipation, radiation hardening, hardware failure rates (~20% of deployed Starlink satellites are no longer functioning), etc.
The whole thing does assume Starship works, so at that point satellites could be launched much faster.
I assume Starmind would use Tesla designed chips, which removes Nvidia's margin and so the cost of the chips is not necessarily so high.
Rad hardening isn't important at low altitudes, and inferencing can smoothly recover from glitched calculations/lockups.
I don't know if it makes economic sense or ever will, but technologically it does seem possible. And if you can't build on Earth for political reasons, then space can win by default.
In terms of what we decide to build, impossible vs. impractical is not a particularly interesting distinction (that distinction can give rise to fun science fiction). Practicality is at the core of good engineering, and possibility is just the first of many steps in evaluating practicality.
If we're going with a distributed approach, there are other ideas that are more practical. For example, send 1 KW boxes to a million people (< 1% of American homes, but there's no reason to limit this to the US). Very roughly, these are beefed-up gaming consoles - you could even start with existing gaming consoles. That box plugs into electricity and ethernet. Pay each of those people $1,000 a month to leave their box running 24/7. For people with a lot of solar at home, it could be a nice income stream. At $1B per year for payouts, it's far cheaper than doing it in orbit. And it doesn't rely on promised but as-yet undelivered technologies. But data centers are probably more practical.
1. Running modern models requires a whole rack of extremely loud equipment that can easily consume 130kw. That's not a load you can or should run at home.
2. It would require a very strong end-to-end implementation of confidential computing to keep the prompts encrypted. If there is any flaw in that infrastructure at all, like someone discovers a way to physically tamper with the hardware to read the GPU memory, then the entire network is a writeoff and would have to be replaced. That's a massive risk. Confidential computing can work in cases where hardware replacements aren't an issue or where the vendor has a long history of successfully defending the platform. But Nvidia is the only GPU vendor with these capabilities and their CC is untrusted.
Putting the workloads in space means noise and data privacy aren't an issue, assuming you trust SpaceX to not peek at your prompts on their way to the cluster.
> The whole problem is difficulty getting grid connections on Earth. If you can just hook up to the grid then why not just use it for everything.
Because you already need inverters and batteries for backup power and then using solar + batteries for ordinary operations and the grid for backup is cheaper than the other way around.
Which is also why you may not even need the grid connection. Suppose you have diesel generators to use in case you have some kind of a fault in the solar system, the same as was traditionally done in case of a failure of a grid connection, and then use those for the one week every two years when solar generation is too low.
(1) these are not ordinary radiators because ordinary radiators aren't gold plated and don't unfold dramatically from compact shipping sizes
(2) It's absolutely loads of radiators
100 square kilometers sounds like a big area. And it is, in continental Europe or in an urban area. In Montana, it's enough space for a few hundred cows. In desert regions, it's worth even less. You can buy 100 square kilometres of unserviced desert land for ~$10M.
Even better, get rid of the mandate for ethanol and cover a portion of the ex corn fields with solar panels with native plants under and around them. A small portion of the land that is near existing transmission lines is needed to replace combustion vehicles with electric vehicles. The bulk of the rest of this land could be available for other uses, including data centers.
This gives: sustained income for landowners, CO2 reduction, power for new uses, and partially restored ecosystems that have been greatly harmed by chemical laden monocultures.
The problem with Oracle is how much utterly and directly depends on them. They still are the authoritative source on "what is Java" and stuff like SAP directly depends on Java and in many cases Oracle Database (the supported alternatives are AFAIK IBM's mainframe stuff and MS SQL, but I only ever saw Oracle whenever I had the misfortune of having to dig into SAP).
If Oracle goes down, a lot of businesses are going to be in a lot of trouble, and there will be a lot of fighting over the scraps.
SAP has largely switched over to their own HANA database for new deployments. Even before that their "AnyDB" database worked with pretty much any backend and is still supported. The reason you see oracle has less to do with what SAP wants and more to do with "It's what the company/engineers have already used/set up in the past".
Regarding Java, SAP has long switched over to openjdk (though oracle java is supported in some cases).
Specifically, they have their own custom fork of openjdk "SapMachine" precisely to be independent from oracle (FYI: if you look at openjdk upstream you will see many core contributors are employed by SAP)
In general, I would say that the actual tech companies that have to interact with oracle's stuff are generally very well equipped to drop them or have already done so. The bigger issue are legacy "consumers" of oracle (e.g. if Pepsi has their data in oracle DB), which often do not have such contingencies.
It's rare for a large company to simply close down. Usually someone buys it out of bankruptcy, and keeps the profitable parts going. Database licensing definitely makes money.
Fundamentally wiping out shareholders and most of bond holders bonds is a good thing. It keeps markets healthy and honest. Excuses about pensions is just excuses from gamblers.
remember during covid it was deemed acceptable for the elderly to die for the economy? We need that, but for useless corporate slop that's now relaceable by useless AI slop. Slop In, Slop Out (SISO)
Why submit links to pages that have absolutely no information on them? ft.com is useless and does not display articles. It should probably be on a banlist for HN.
Oracle cannot possibly be expecting to meet its bets here. My own empirical one-person observation is that my friend worked there in the group that went around the world standing up their new cloud datacenters, and he was there from basically 2019 to earlier this year. They laid him and half his team off earlier this year. Absolutely nonsensical if they're really building out cloud data centers. Because that's exactly what his job was for the previous 5 years....
Can anyone make that make sense? The team was like 15 people and is now 7. Not exactly a large enough team to build out billions of dollars worth of data centers... Maybe they're just going to contract that all out, but this guy and his team were a very smooth, very well greased machine for standing this stuff up quickly and reliably.
From my limited second-hand understanding of orcl, a team that operates in a smooth and well greased manner is quite the anomaly. I could see why the company would have an immune response to it.
I have to imagine that their legal team is a smooth, well oiled machine. The technical side on the other hand ...
Minor nit, the lubricant there isn't mineral oil but blood.
LOL - too competent for their own good :(
Perhaps Larry Ellison is a bad man?
Don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.
Not bad, just a lawnmower.
> Because that's exactly what his job was for the previous 5 years...
Or possibly senior leadership isn’t happy with the pace of DC buildout over the last 5-years.
Very unlikely to be the technical build team at fault for that.
Real estate, legal, permitting, utility connections, construction, plant fit out, testing and certification, security, customs and immigration, and shipping all need to happen first - and every one of those has room for huge amounts of uncertainty and delay, more so if you're doing it internationally.
There aren't many shortcuts that you can take when you're dealing with a complex combination of hardware, property, and law.
Technical staff are easiest to pin the blame on in any given situation. All those other fields require enormously more people skills and political inclination.
If you are in an org like that and there is an effort to pin something on technical people inappropriately the reaction when there's solid push back approaches total hysterical breakdown since it's so unexpected. Even if the tech staff "win" they'll be marked for the rest of their time there.
That matches my experience at google. Getting the land and approvals was the most time, then the basic site prep and building shells and utilities, then basic building fit out, and then finally the actual tech installs.
Yeah - and that's if everything goes to plan!
The real way to increase throughput is to first slow down and smooth out the inevitable bumps by adding adequate slack and building up an inventory of shovel-ready projects as a buffer - and then to start running multiple teams in parallel.
The fact that OP's friend experienced Oracle doing the exact opposite of this lends credence to the idea that they're under pressure and are perhaps panicking.
Well I guess we can assume that this means it's not the reason senior leadership laid them off because senior leaders definitely never scapegoat their underlings or have too little competence to correctly assess why things failed!
yes but sometimes a VP gets fired, new VP comes in, and says "we'll outsource this" or "we'll use this home grown team doing something else" and unfortunately tons of people are caught in a layoff, even if they were good.
They said with AI nowadays less people can do more, be more productive than ever!
/s
Oracle is increasingly looking like the Lehman Brothers of the AI boom. One day it will all go pop and the cards will start crumbling elsewhere in the industry.
Larry’s son runs paramount now, and given he’s driving it to become the next Fox News challenger, it’s a given the current admin will give them a sweet heart deal.
And seems like he has been forcing migrations to Oracle Cloud into at least some of the daughter companies he has bought, even when they've been having way more problems. OCI needs some clients to fill data centers!
Yeah, but they'll need to time their bust for before Jan next year. There is a significantly lower chance of a Democratic congress being as sympathetic.
You're assuming we'll actually have a free and fair election.
We'll find out in about 100 days!
They'll just spin some divisions off and/or sell the DC's they have to Anthropic or others at a profit. They could also just rent compute out at insane margins. They aren't going anywhere.
For 50 years the idea of selling used hardware and hardware facilities at a profit was a joke. If it is not a joke again in under 10 years then the overall economics of the world are going to be the joke and it will be a very dark one.
Rent compute out at insane margins is plan A.
Still, capital isn't getting any cheaper for them and their CDS are still climbing.
Except for the part where Oracle is so deeply embedded into the US government, and Larry Ellison is connected enough that they will be granted any and all bailouts necessary to prevent this (while everyone pretends not to notice that such bailouts are socialism)
He will for sure try. Congressional Republicans seem to be more comfortable going off the rez, tho, even before the year-end deadline for shenanigans.
I imagine they'd be split up, and the essential database business would be what's actually bailed out.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer company
Interviewed there early in my career. The vibe was very much off. Ran into the same vibe many years later when a company that acquired a company I founded got bought by Computer Associates. Places where doing good work and making good things seemed way down the list of priorities. I get the feeling I was pitied for naïveté.
> I get the feeling I was pitied for naïveté.
I have to assume so, sadly. Peers have said my preference towards quality over quantity is why I haven't "launched" [ahead of them? unclear]... as if they're nicely retired with drinks on the beach, or something. Completely blind to the fact that our priorities differ and, well, reality/status.
Long way to say, turn the performative pity right around on 'em. Their boss is a lawn mower: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=38m33s
That is the exact vibe I got working at a state government IT department.
[dead]
From what I can tell, the DC buildout isn't going that well. I've been wondering about the current status of the projects because there hasn't been much in the news or here about new DC's coming online. This report summary makes the point that getting power to the datacenters with onsite generation is running into roadblocks from permitting to even finding turbines to buy. He who shouldn't be named (here) made the same point in an interview that popped up on my youtube feed while pitching the datacenters-in-spaaaace angle. Software people are getting a lesson on the difficulties of utility scale power hardware.
https://cleanview.co/reports/behind-the-meter-data-centers
/can't read the article
If Oracle can't acquire power generation for their WI facilities they've been asleep. Generac is based out of WI and rapidly expanding their manufacturing footprint to match DC demand. Connect the dots to political lobbying and tax breaks to one of the biggest local businesses in an now-recovering manufacturing state to secure generation equipment. A year ago Oracle could've bought Generac outright for less than some of these flailing partnerships they've done.
Power generation is never the problem. Power transmission is.
Yeah, power utilities in the DMV area have $20B of projects to try to bring in 3GW of capacity.
The idea that we can’t get enough electrical power on earth because of supply constraints, but that we can solve that by launching the datacenters and their entire support infrastructure into space makes no sense unless you’re a huckster trying to pump up your space launch business ahead of an IPO. There’s no way we are more constrained on land-based solar+battery equipment than we would be on space-worthy solar+battery+space-cooling equipment plus sufficient launch infrastructure and resources. Meanwhile, our government is paying companies to stop building wind power and bombing sources of natural gas.
sheesh i didn't say a datacenter-in-space was a good/feasibnle idea. The point i was making is I feel that building power plants to power a datacenter is turning out to be harder than software people realize and multi-year (or worse) delays likely the result.
Space DC make sense when local governments and communities don't want DC built on Earth. Space DC is an engineering and finance problem, not a problem in legal/permission, real estate, power generation, grid delivery, environmental, etc.
You think that building out space infrastructure is a less hard problem to solve than bribing a few local governments to get some building permits?
>a less hard problem to solve than bribing a few local governments
Wouldn't it be best if the data centers were just... good neighbors? Like everyone talking about illegal bribes and impossible moonshots when the answer is just don't suck?
We are well past the point of these companies caring about their reputations. People are already losing their homes over this. Here is Penguinz0's commentary on a news report of GA Power eminent domaining someone's home to run a power line through it to power a data center.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bySJ-oVGtvs
The general problem is that we've made construction suck for a while now and people are suddenly paying attention to it but only in the case of data centers.
You don't get caught paying bribes if government officials aren't accepting bribes. The problem is the governments have been operating in a mode where blocking everything is the default and paying bribes is the expected way for things to get approved.
The issue with this is that datacenters are inherent "suck" machines. It takes a lot more effort and cost for them to not suck then for them to suck, so "sucking" is part of their core design.
Up till recently, they were a rare enough object that distressed communities still saw the glitz and glam that they are sold with as valuable. Now that brutalist assholes are trying to jam them in every nook and cranny of the earth, word is getting out and people aren't buying it anymore.
There have been some attempts to try floating or water immersed data centers that mitigate or at least hide some of their suckiness, but these were hard and costly, so the incentives weren't there to do them anyway. Maybe now those ideas will resurface and improve, but I expect "bribe, con or sue rural community to destroy their quality of life" is still cheaper and easier.
You missed the lawsuits by everyone else.
Isn't it still far simpler and cheaper to build and maintain a DC in the most rural parts of North America than to launch it to space?
You still need to build the power infrastructure to the rural areas. Build the infrastructure for the people, like roads, sewage, water, buildings, etc. Navigate the regulation and permit processes.
For whatever reason, nobody is trying to build solar-powered AI datacenters. Maybe they can't find enough land.
The space required to install enough solar panels, especially in the places these things are going (like Ohio, where it's NOT ideal for solar generation), would far, far outsize the data center itself by a significant magnitude.
Half the time you get 0 solar power.
If only data centers had some kind of backup systems to prevent power interruptions, like inverters with batteries attached to them. They could call it an Uninterruptible Power Supply and then charge the batteries when other power is available and run on them when it isn't.
Not nearly big enough for data centers approaching 1 GW. Largest is 3 GWH which gets you 3ish hours.
Theoretically you can put as many batteries together but it'd be enormously expensive and run into the same supply chain issues.
Anything using 1GW of power is going to be "enormously expensive". The all-in cost of a 1GW data center is on the order of $50 billion. A billion dollars in storage batteries is ~2% of the cost, which is completely reasonable.
~1600 GWh of lithium batteries are produced each year and hundreds of GWh/year of production capacity have been added in each of the last few years, so ~12 GWh isn't going to upend the market.
UPSes are designed to run for minutes not hours. I guess enough Megapacks to run overnight would be more expensive than gas generators.
If grid storage batteries are economical in the general case then why wouldn't they be doubly so in a place where the inverters are a sunk cost and you're saving the transmission costs because the load is at the same site as the batteries?
The competition isn't the cost of generators, it's the cost of grid power, or the cost of operating gas generators every day.
They aren't economical in the general sense. They are economical to provide frequency stabilization, grid efficiency, and maybe a few hours of demand shifting. They're not yet economical to store solar power during the day and discharge it at night. We are getting closer but I don't think we are quite yet there.
As far as I can work out, the cost is competitive as long as you're using the capacity every day, especially when it lets you avoid paying transmission costs. The thing that doesn't work is to have enough battery storage to handle extended periods of low generation, because for that you need dramatically more storage capacity while only using the surplus on rare occasions. But a data center could use the grid or backup generators on those rare occasions while still using batteries overnight every night.
It takes 2.5 million solar panels to generate 1GW of electricity assuming 400W per panel and direct sunlight. 2.5M times 18 sq ft per panel is about 1000 acres or ~1.55 sq mi.
That would work for a 1 GW data center, during the day, without clouds, during the summer.
Is that supposed to be a lot? The US is some 3.8 million square miles.
A decade old Reddit thread estimated there are 60 square miles of just McDonalds. That is, a McDonalds footprint of solar panels alone is 39GW.
https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/2bq7l2/so_i...
The US gov't owns at least 50% of every state in the west. Or they could just build in the middle of bum f*ck Texas and get fossil and renewables. Too bad Texas' grid is so piss poor
The Texas grid that already generates more TWh from renewables than any other state?
Space Datacenters are an engineering problem (laws of physics allows it)
Earth Datacenters are a human, NIMBY, ego, misinformation, legal, bureaucracy problem.
I'm going to bet on Space Datacenters.
Edit: classic HN lacking imagination and always wrong about the future
https://youtu.be/FKHENV75b9Q?si=JFBsT2HinR02AI4P
Sending to LEO costs around $2,700 usd and 9kWh of fuel per kilogram.
If you manage to send a data center with high end processing units, large array of solar panels, even larger liquid cooling and tick shielding against solar rays you’d have spent probably 100x to 1000x the cost of an equivalent earth data center even without considering hardware deprecation.
You’re better off sinking your data center deep in the sea and even that is probably not happening at large scales.
I tried to find what the worst option is other than putting them in space and you can do a lot! Trucking diesel to the middle of the Sahara is a decent option in comparison to space.
Don't forget trucking in the cooling water.
https://youtu.be/FKHENV75b9Q?si=JFBsT2HinR02AI4P
I mean if we're replying with videos at this point, here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qpdUNMt2yg
One is actually building while the other is making Youtube videos. Also the video literally answers the economic question.
I'm happy with my bet
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I think the question here is: do the laws of economics allow it?
Yes. https://youtu.be/FKHENV75b9Q?si=JFBsT2HinR02AI4P
Oh, well, if the CEO of a company who only exists to try to convince people it is possible says it's possible on a podcast hosted by a VC firm who also wants to convince people it is possible so they can make their money back then it must be!
I've always wondered who is gullible enough to even bother watching this kind of garbage, thank you for answering that question.
Space data centers are an intrinsically cool idea, and honestly I hope we see at least one for the sheer marvel of such a project. But to be cost efficient, it has to be cheaper than rural US, cheaper than buying some island, cheaper than setting it up on a converted freighter ship and tanking the fuel in, etc.
BUT once Earth has a fully paid off space elevator the unit economics will make sense, or if we have orbital space factories and don't have any lift costs, etc. It's all possible, but at a 50 year+ timescale and immense investment. All of which I hope for because I'd like to see more space development and exploration.
How do the laws of physics allow it? How do you disperse the heat? How do you protect your compute from cosmic rays? How do you get enough solar up there without catastrophic damage from micrometeorites?
Ars Technica is doing a series on this. They have published 2/3 parts so far. https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-buil...
I think the company that has managed to launch and currently operates ~10k satellites can figure those out. Still remains to be seen if the economics make sense, but with increased "anti" stuff happening all around (some of which surely is manufactured) who knows? 5 - 10 years from now things might change.
How much SpaceX stock did you buy? Are you buying this dip?
Space data centers require hundreds of daily launches. Disney and the massive industries around Canaveral will NIMBY it hard.
On Earth it has to be fossil fuels. With solar you can't do it. I haven't done the calculations myself so, full disclosure, AI work ahead. But I asked GPT 5.6 how big a solar and battery farm would have to be to power a one gigawatt datacenter such that it could ride out a few cloudy days in a row (this is far below the reliability bar).
Its answer is you'd need an "absurdly large battery" and a solar farm of over 100 square kilometers, quite possibly up to over 200 square kilometers. And it would need to be built in the desert.
Also, normal utility scale LiON battery sites are only meant to provide stabilization services for hours, not days.
The problem is you have to overspec the solar farm quite a lot because it must not only be able to power a one gigawatt facility, but also generate more than that so it can recharge the battery packs during the day too.
So this just doesn't work. You think datacenter permitting is bad when it only requires some on-site gas turbines? Imagine the difficulty of getting a 200 square kilometer solar farm over the finishing line.
No, it's quite possible Elon is going to win this one. Regulation is expensive! He can just fire a constant stream of satellites into space. The constellation needed to provide a gigawatt of inferencing would be about the same size as today's Starlink system, well within the bounds of what he's proven can be done.
The threat to space based datacenters isn't really the physics of it. It's the risk of a bubble pop that temporarily craters demand and/or an overbuild of terrestrial capacity. Outside of the software industry we don't see huge new blocks of inferencing demand, and OpenAI at least doesn't seem capacity constrained at all right now.
Why restrict yourself to 100% solar? Solar augmented by grid is pretty great.
Also, you very conspicuously avoided talking about the difficulty/impact of a 1GW datacenter in space. One might suspect your motives aren't as impartial as you seem to think.
The whole problem is difficulty getting grid connections on Earth. If you can just hook up to the grid then why not just use it for everything.
I don't have any motives, what are you talking about? I don't own SpaceX stock if that's what you're thinking.
What's the difficulty of a 1GW datacenter in space? The number of satellites it requires seems to be within the realm of what SpaceX has already achieved. If the calculations are wrong, by all means say so, I haven't checked them.
> What's the difficulty of a 1GW datacenter in space?
Simple back of the envelope calculations?
Let's assume your numbers are correct and that panels in space can generate 10x the power per square meter per 24 hour period (due to efficiency, lack of night, and lack of atmosphere/weather). That means 10 KM^2 are needed for one such data center. The largest we've built in space is ~3,000 M^2 on the ISS. So one of these DCs in space will require an array ~3,000 times the size of the largest we've built before. Or, it's going to require ~3,000 satellites, each with an array the size of the largest we've ever deployed.
The largest Starlink satellites currently deployed generate less than 30 KW each. We'd need more than 30,000 of those to generate this much power. Starlink has launched ~12,500 to date, with ~10,000 still functioning. So 3x the size of the functioning fleet that's taken 8+ years to deploy. Currently, we are deploying well under 5,000 per year. Let's assume we can come up with enough spare capacity to launch 5,000 per year. That's 6 years to deploy the first 1GW DC. By the time we get to 1GW, the average GPU is 3 years old. So we need to continue to deploy 5,000 satellites per year to maintain 1GW of GPUs that are, on average, 3 years behind current generation GPU designs.
This is all before we get to the economics of launching, the cost of the satellites themselves, heat dissipation, radiation hardening, hardware failure rates (~20% of deployed Starlink satellites are no longer functioning), etc.
The whole thing does assume Starship works, so at that point satellites could be launched much faster.
I assume Starmind would use Tesla designed chips, which removes Nvidia's margin and so the cost of the chips is not necessarily so high.
Rad hardening isn't important at low altitudes, and inferencing can smoothly recover from glitched calculations/lockups.
I don't know if it makes economic sense or ever will, but technologically it does seem possible. And if you can't build on Earth for political reasons, then space can win by default.
In terms of what we decide to build, impossible vs. impractical is not a particularly interesting distinction (that distinction can give rise to fun science fiction). Practicality is at the core of good engineering, and possibility is just the first of many steps in evaluating practicality.
If we're going with a distributed approach, there are other ideas that are more practical. For example, send 1 KW boxes to a million people (< 1% of American homes, but there's no reason to limit this to the US). Very roughly, these are beefed-up gaming consoles - you could even start with existing gaming consoles. That box plugs into electricity and ethernet. Pay each of those people $1,000 a month to leave their box running 24/7. For people with a lot of solar at home, it could be a nice income stream. At $1B per year for payouts, it's far cheaper than doing it in orbit. And it doesn't rely on promised but as-yet undelivered technologies. But data centers are probably more practical.
I've thought of that but it wouldn't be easier.
1. Running modern models requires a whole rack of extremely loud equipment that can easily consume 130kw. That's not a load you can or should run at home.
2. It would require a very strong end-to-end implementation of confidential computing to keep the prompts encrypted. If there is any flaw in that infrastructure at all, like someone discovers a way to physically tamper with the hardware to read the GPU memory, then the entire network is a writeoff and would have to be replaced. That's a massive risk. Confidential computing can work in cases where hardware replacements aren't an issue or where the vendor has a long history of successfully defending the platform. But Nvidia is the only GPU vendor with these capabilities and their CC is untrusted.
Putting the workloads in space means noise and data privacy aren't an issue, assuming you trust SpaceX to not peek at your prompts on their way to the cluster.
> The whole problem is difficulty getting grid connections on Earth. If you can just hook up to the grid then why not just use it for everything.
Because you already need inverters and batteries for backup power and then using solar + batteries for ordinary operations and the grid for backup is cheaper than the other way around.
Which is also why you may not even need the grid connection. Suppose you have diesel generators to use in case you have some kind of a fault in the solar system, the same as was traditionally done in case of a failure of a grid connection, and then use those for the one week every two years when solar generation is too low.
> What's the difficulty of a 1GW datacenter in space?
Why don't you ask your AI, the way you did with your earth-based scenario?
How do you cool the data center in space cost effectively? Unfortunately in space there isn't a lot of material (air) to transfer the heat.
You can just use ordinary radiators. Do the calculations, cooling isn't the problem it's made out to be.
It's the size of the radiators and the expense of getting them up into orbit (along with maintenance)
Most of my assumptions come from discussions like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876105
(1) these are not ordinary radiators because ordinary radiators aren't gold plated and don't unfold dramatically from compact shipping sizes (2) It's absolutely loads of radiators
100 square kilometers sounds like a big area. And it is, in continental Europe or in an urban area. In Montana, it's enough space for a few hundred cows. In desert regions, it's worth even less. You can buy 100 square kilometres of unserviced desert land for ~$10M.
Even better, get rid of the mandate for ethanol and cover a portion of the ex corn fields with solar panels with native plants under and around them. A small portion of the land that is near existing transmission lines is needed to replace combustion vehicles with electric vehicles. The bulk of the rest of this land could be available for other uses, including data centers.
This gives: sustained income for landowners, CO2 reduction, power for new uses, and partially restored ecosystems that have been greatly harmed by chemical laden monocultures.
Related:
S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48909768
One level above junk. Yikes.
The problem with Oracle is how much utterly and directly depends on them. They still are the authoritative source on "what is Java" and stuff like SAP directly depends on Java and in many cases Oracle Database (the supported alternatives are AFAIK IBM's mainframe stuff and MS SQL, but I only ever saw Oracle whenever I had the misfortune of having to dig into SAP).
If Oracle goes down, a lot of businesses are going to be in a lot of trouble, and there will be a lot of fighting over the scraps.
SAP has largely switched over to their own HANA database for new deployments. Even before that their "AnyDB" database worked with pretty much any backend and is still supported. The reason you see oracle has less to do with what SAP wants and more to do with "It's what the company/engineers have already used/set up in the past".
Regarding Java, SAP has long switched over to openjdk (though oracle java is supported in some cases). Specifically, they have their own custom fork of openjdk "SapMachine" precisely to be independent from oracle (FYI: if you look at openjdk upstream you will see many core contributors are employed by SAP)
In general, I would say that the actual tech companies that have to interact with oracle's stuff are generally very well equipped to drop them or have already done so. The bigger issue are legacy "consumers" of oracle (e.g. if Pepsi has their data in oracle DB), which often do not have such contingencies.
It's rare for a large company to simply close down. Usually someone buys it out of bankruptcy, and keeps the profitable parts going. Database licensing definitely makes money.
yeah, like my university's whole accounting system...
oh no, not the hierarchy of consulting! the horrors. Better grab your nearest gpu and open model to replace them.
Damn, that's after it was already lowered last fall. I lack perspective, does that mean it's sinking like a stone?
every stock should have the chance to go to zero if we are to have a true Free Market.
Fundamentally wiping out shareholders and most of bond holders bonds is a good thing. It keeps markets healthy and honest. Excuses about pensions is just excuses from gamblers.
remember during covid it was deemed acceptable for the elderly to die for the economy? We need that, but for useless corporate slop that's now relaceable by useless AI slop. Slop In, Slop Out (SISO)
The boom/bust cycle is the Faustian engine of innovation. Take away the risk of busts and we have fake capitalism without innovation or renewal.
Instead they bail them out and let society go to zero. But socialism bad
https://archive.md/voqjr
Related:
Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48987863
Why submit links to pages that have absolutely no information on them? ft.com is useless and does not display articles. It should probably be on a banlist for HN.
There’s an archive link in the comments, so it’s readable.