Orbit could ease data centers’ energy and land demands

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 10:54

   Well, first of all, let's talk about why. Why on earth are we talking about building data centers in orbit like like why on earth is this even remotely a good idea or worth talking about well there's a bunch of reasons why and i i hope that by the end of the day today most people in this audience would agree with my viewpoint that it's actually a pretty good idea to do i mean a lot of i just did an interview with aaron brockovich who is a lot of of Americans, I think a lot of people in the world are really concerned with the amount of energy that the data centers are consuming.

2. 11:34

   They're concerned about the water supply. There hasn't been a lot of talk about putting these things in space. I think, I mean, I think it's a big problem you're tackling here. Yeah. Yeah. There's a few advantages of doing this stuff in space and you hit on a couple of them. And I'll just kind of go over this quickly so people know what we're talking about. What you're looking at here on the screen, little orange lines represent where the satellites would be in orbit.

3. 12:03

   And you can see the way that the satellites are positioned, they're illuminated by the sun nearly continuously. So we put our satellites in these polar orbits. They're called sun-synchronous orbits. Some people call them the terminator orbit, which I think is pretty cool. But in these orbits, your satellites are illuminated nearly continuously. And so what we're talking about doing here is taking what was already one of the cheapest forms of energy production, which is traditional solar, and putting it in an environment where it produces even more power per unit solar panel. So there's clearly something there that, if we can harness it in the right way is a driver of much more energy and ideally much more economically. So that's the first one. The second one is as we look at data center build outs, it's fundamentally a real estate problem. It's

4. 13:00

   real estate development, it's procuring the natural resources to power the data centers, whether it's energy, water, land use rights, we are not using anybody's land in outer space, in case anybody, like, didn't get that part of this. And the last part about this is, is we, this is, I mean, again, should not be a huge surprise to anybody but there's not literal Power plugs coming down from the satellite into the power grid in your local neighborhood.

5. 13:36

   This has no effect on your power grid. And so the idea here is, is that we as a country, I think, can have our cake and eat it too, right? We can both lead in frontier AI and not have, you know, these negative effects on American houses that I think is pretty universal in 2026. yeah it seems um a lot of strain is going to come off the power grid i mean i think the power grid is something anybody who's educated on is concerned about it yeah and so i mean is is one of these satellites going to be able to produce enough energy with just solar to to power these what's inside of the satellite the data center It's a great question. And we're going to talk about how we get it to the size that matters.

6. 14:31

   Let's actually go there now. So earlier this year, we announced to the world that we're building a constellation of these things in outer space. So it's 20,000 satellites. Each one produces about a megawatt of peak power. It's a constellation in orbit that produces about 20 gigawatts of power. It's a lot of power. For the audience that doesn't know what 20 gigawatts of power is, can you give me a comparison of how much power that actually is?

7. 15:07

   Yeah, I think we can do that. This is what data centers use. Wow. What am I looking at here? What is this graph? So what we're looking at here is power drawn in gigawatts by data centers per year. And you can see here, it's exploding, right? The amount of energy that data centers are going to use, I mean, in 28 and 29, it's, I mean, you can look at the numbers of how much power data centers are using even in 2023.

8. 15:44

   three. And the effects that it's having on people's water bills, people's electric bills, I know you've had a lot of firsthand experience with this stuff and talked to people that have lived with it. It's real. And we see it in American politics. Data centers are pretty unpopular. But they don't have to be because we can build them in outer space. So this is roughly the scale of what we're contemplating with our constellation build. It's building a power grid in orbit that generates the same amount of power that all data centers in the U.S. used just three years ago. Wow.

9. 16:27

   How are you going to cool these things? I mean, a lot of people, a lot of people are concerned about the water. The data centers pollute the water, they use all the water, worried about the depletion of our aquifers I mean it's a massive concern luckily water is not very good at cooling stuff in space and so there we'll talk a little bit more about how we keep these things cool in space the physics of it are pretty interesting it involves actually using the coldness of outer space and the temperature differential to emit heat in outer space.

10. 17:08

    So just a little reminder, the way that we all on Earth experience heat transfer totally different than in outer space, right? On Earth, you experience heat transfer through conduction, meaning heat transfer, through convection, fans blowing, and through radiative, like in the case. of something getting so hot that it glows in space there's no air and you're kind of not really touching very much and so that radiative heat transfer is your main method of dissipating heat from the system and it's not this like it's kind of interesting because when people talk about data centers in space this concept of how do you dissipate the heat that they generate is front and center but when you talk to people that actually work in the space industry it's like every single spacecraft has a thermal budget.

11. 18:04

    Like, you can't put stuff in space and not think about how it dissipates heat for this very reason. And so we can get to a little bit more of that in a little bit.