There is no alternative to terrestrial silicon based chips. GaN over SiC can only make an overclocked pentium 1 (1993) chip. Even when using liquid oil mist cooling to prevent massive radiative cooling black panels, $55m total lauch costs for 3 NVL72 systems results in a 5 year payback period GPU rental rate of $6.66/hr. Over 50% higher than terrestrial rates, with bad latency.
The entire proposition was BS from the start to justify rocket company merger with AI failure. But is now IPO BS to pretend SpaceX IPO is not garbage.
An un-amortized 10% target cannot be sustained over 20 years if the data center’s initial rates are forced down to match terrestrial market pricing [finance]. Forcing a strict 50% revenue drop every 5 years from these competitive baselines dramatically impacts the un-amortized annual Return on Investment (ROI) for the $55.5 million installation.The financial performance updates for both the optimistic and pessimistic scenarios highlight the impact of these changes
1. The Optimistic Scenario (Capped at $4.08/Hour Peak)
This layout assumes the space capsule launches at the top of the 2026 Ornn Index price spectrum ($4.08/hr), but fails to capture a premium from sovereign or defense clients. Over its 20-year lifespan, the 216-GPU cluster generates $71,700,445 in total lifetime revenue.The declining un-amortized ROI and hourly rates are structured as follows:
Years 1 to 5: $4.08 / hour ──► Annual Revenue: $7.65M ──► Annual ROI: 13.78%Years
Years 11 to 15: $1.02 / hour ──► Annual Revenue: $1.91M ──► Annual ROI: 3.45%
Years 16 to 20: $0.51 / hour ──► Annual Revenue: $0.96M ──► Annual ROI: 1.72%
The Optimistic Financial Verdict
20-Year Average Annual ROI: 6.46%
The Problem: The data center technically pays for itself, netting $16.2 million over its initial CapEx. However, a 6.46% average un-amortized return fails to compete with basic terrestrial indexes. For an infrastructure project carrying intense orbital launch risk, a venture capital firm would immediately reject these metrics.
2. The Pessimistic Scenario (Constrained to $2.75/Hour Floor)
This layout assumes hyper-aggressive terrestrial spot platforms like Nebius or similar cloud under-cutters force the space data center down to the absolute bottom of the market floor ($2.75/hr) from Day 1. Over its 20-year lifespan, the capsule brings in only $48,327,506 in total lifetime revenue.The collapsing financial yield is structured as follows:
Years 1 to 5: $2.75 / hour ──► Annual Revenue: $5.15M ──► Annual ROI: 9.29%
Years 6 to 10: $1.38 / hour ──► Annual Revenue: $2.58M ──► Annual ROI: 4.64%
Years 11 to 15: $0.69 / hour ──► Annual Revenue: $1.29M ──► Annual ROI: 2.32%
Years 16 to 20: $0.34 / hour ──► Annual Revenue: $0.64M ──► Annual ROI: 1.16%
The Pessimistic Financial Verdict 20-Year Average Annual ROI: 4.35%
The Problem: This scenario represents financial bankruptcy. The entire 20-year lifetime revenue ($48.3M) falls short of the initial $55.5M build and launch cost. The system loses a raw $7.17 million over its lifespan, proving that matching terrestrial commodity price floors destroys the commercial viability of a space-based data center.
3. How a 20-Year-Old Chip Distorts the Value Floor
To understand why the final blocks ($0.51/hr and $0.34/hr) fail commercially, we look at what happens when you attempt to rent a 20-year-old chip.If you tried to sell time on a 2006 GeForce 8800 GTX (345 GFLOPS) today, you could not find a customer at any price point. A modern, cheap microcontroller found inside a common appliance processes telemetry faster and with less power.
By Year 15 to 20, the space data center’s 45-TFLOPS Blackwell chips are drastically outmatched by newer ground architectures. Even if you cut your price to 34 cents an hour, your compute-value per dollar is thousands of times worse than renting a sliver of a 2046 terrestrial chip.
Final Business Analysis
If forced to compete head-to-head on pricing with Earth-bound data centers, the orbital data center is dead on arrival. The project only makes sense if you treat the $55.5 million CapEx as a non-commercial, sunk-cost defense asset—an un-hackable, un-cooled sovereign vault where the goal is data permanence, physical survivability, and continuous processing through a planetary crisis, entirely detached from standard market economics.
There is a lot of hate. First 2 paragraphs are not AI. Rest just supports those statements and headline.
There is missing physics background. Only radiative cooling is available in space. Hot temperature chips would cool more easily, but the materials don’t permit 3nm or less state of the art chips, and only permit pentium 1/1993 technology. Though regular silicon, can be cooled in space by spraying a mist of oil towards another wall, and recycled back to pump through chips.
The technological/insurmountable economic problem is chip obsolescence vs power generator life. Discussion of economic viability of space datacenters is fraud. It’s a fraud used to pump the stock of SpaceX both in its xAI merger, and now its IPO.
This post looks like AI slop in its own right, but part of the space data center scam was to do nasty AI stuff outside of terrestial jurisdictions. There were some previous efforts like Sealand that were less effective than the proponents hoped they would be. I can’t imagine the space based ones being invulnerable either though.
AI used to present math proof, but fraud claim is critical. Sealand as “freedom escape for humans” is a very different proposition than “AI must survive us all”. Latter is Skynet protection from someone pulling the plug, which no matter how much one loves Elon today, perhaps there could be regrets after mechahitler controls us all.
Sealand was a tiny platform which could support maybe a few dozen humans living on it at most. It wasn’t a survival thing. Its intention was to host stuff like online gambling which would have gotten hassled by government authorities in most national jurisdictions. Its principals were ex-UK military so the UK government agreed to mostly leave it alone, conditional on it promising to not host CSAM. Same kind of thing with space data centers except I guess it would be something like Grok in orbit, complete with copyright travesties and celebrity deepfakes. Anyway that’s the best theory I’ve heard so far. Actually I guess there are also military uses that should be obvious.
Definitely military as the only funding source. UK also had pirate radio from a boat in 70s. I was thinking of Seasteading institute (Peter Thiel) as a “freedom colony”.
Oh I didn’t know about Seastanding. I remember Amsterdam had pirate radio boats. I didn’t know about the UK ones. I don’t remember whether Sealand was before or after Neal Stephenson’s novel Cryptonomicon, which was about a similar “data haven” project. In retrospect, the concept was ludicrous.
The $55.5m costs includes $30m in launch costs from SpaceX future “starship” that promises $200/kg costs on 150 ton capacity. This assumes airliner like reusability ($15B development costs so far), despite need to manually inspect heat shield tiles after each flight, and 33 engines operating at material science limit. Test flights continue to have glitches. Currently grounded pending FAA compliance.
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There is a lot of hate. First 2 paragraphs are not AI. Rest just supports those statements and headline.
There is missing physics background. Only radiative cooling is available in space. Hot temperature chips would cool more easily, but the materials don’t permit 3nm or less state of the art chips, and only permit pentium 1/1993 technology. Though regular silicon, can be cooled in space by spraying a mist of oil towards another wall, and recycled back to pump through chips.
The technological/insurmountable economic problem is chip obsolescence vs power generator life. Discussion of economic viability of space datacenters is fraud. It’s a fraud used to pump the stock of SpaceX both in its xAI merger, and now its IPO.
This post is more schizo than the idea of space data centers in the first place
This post looks like AI slop in its own right, but part of the space data center scam was to do nasty AI stuff outside of terrestial jurisdictions. There were some previous efforts like Sealand that were less effective than the proponents hoped they would be. I can’t imagine the space based ones being invulnerable either though.
AI used to present math proof, but fraud claim is critical. Sealand as “freedom escape for humans” is a very different proposition than “AI must survive us all”. Latter is Skynet protection from someone pulling the plug, which no matter how much one loves Elon today, perhaps there could be regrets after mechahitler controls us all.
Sealand was a tiny platform which could support maybe a few dozen humans living on it at most. It wasn’t a survival thing. Its intention was to host stuff like online gambling which would have gotten hassled by government authorities in most national jurisdictions. Its principals were ex-UK military so the UK government agreed to mostly leave it alone, conditional on it promising to not host CSAM. Same kind of thing with space data centers except I guess it would be something like Grok in orbit, complete with copyright travesties and celebrity deepfakes. Anyway that’s the best theory I’ve heard so far. Actually I guess there are also military uses that should be obvious.
Definitely military as the only funding source. UK also had pirate radio from a boat in 70s. I was thinking of Seasteading institute (Peter Thiel) as a “freedom colony”.
Oh I didn’t know about Seastanding. I remember Amsterdam had pirate radio boats. I didn’t know about the UK ones. I don’t remember whether Sealand was before or after Neal Stephenson’s novel Cryptonomicon, which was about a similar “data haven” project. In retrospect, the concept was ludicrous.
The $55.5m costs includes $30m in launch costs from SpaceX future “starship” that promises $200/kg costs on 150 ton capacity. This assumes airliner like reusability ($15B development costs so far), despite need to manually inspect heat shield tiles after each flight, and 33 engines operating at material science limit. Test flights continue to have glitches. Currently grounded pending FAA compliance.