OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dismissed the idea of data centers in space being a viable option in the next few years as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk pursues their deployment.
“I honestly think the idea with the current landscape of putting data centers in space is ridiculous,” Altman said in an interview with Indian Express. “It will make sense someday.”
Altman said that space-based artificial intelligence (AI) data center projects would have to deal with high launch costs as well as operational and maintenance challenges, like how to fix a broken or damaged component while the data center is in orbit.
“We are not there yet. There will come a time. Orbital data centers are not something that’s going to matter at scale this decade,” Altman said in the interview.
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SpaceX’s Musk said earlier this month at an event announcing SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI that the energy demands of AI will require moving data centers to space because of the strain it puts on the environment.
“In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale,” Musk said. “My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.”
SpaceX’s merger with xAI, the AI company Musk founded that went on to acquire the X social media platform, aims to create a more than $1 trillion company ahead of a planned initial public offering that will enable them raise capital and speed up plans to deploy data centers in space.
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SpaceX recently filed a document with the Federal Communications Commission requesting to launch up to 1 million satellites that would function as data centers in Earth’s orbit.
Musk said in a memo outlining his plans that SpaceX aims to put a million tons of satellites into orbit per year with 100 kilowatts of compute power per ton, adding 100 gigawatts of AI computing capacity per year.
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Other tech companies pursuing space-based data centers include Google, as CEO Sundar Pichai told “Fox News Sunday” that the company could put solar-powered data centers in space as soon as next year as part of what’s known as Project Suncatcher.
Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said at the Cisco AI Summit earlier this month, “there are not enough rockets to launch a million satellites yet, so we’re, like, pretty far from that.”
“If you think about the cost of getting a payload in space today, it’s massive,” Garman added. “It is just not economical.”
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