Happy to read a draft! We also looked a sea-based data centers, SMRs, and permitting/buildout arbitrage in other nations. My current thinking is that you’ll see a lot of friction but its possible in principle to scale energy up, perhaps to the tune of hundreds of GW/yr even if only using solar. The more fundamentally binding constraint to me seems to just be chip production but thats not to say that these various bottlenecks don’t at least partially bind or create friction at various points. You’d probably have a situation in hyperscalers are water flowing down hill, pivoting to the next best way to scale compute, then I think that eventually just goes to space. Given the vested interest of SpaceX and SpaceX’s longterm plans for lunar industrial base then Dyson Swarm construction I expect they’ll invest heavily in making them work. Seems to me they will probably successful in making ODCs viable and you’d see this dynamic where space prices are falling while headwinds for terrestrial buildout worsen. Many uncertainties remain however, difficult to forecast Starship scaling timelines. The regulatory environment is also currently favorable but untested at the scales we’re talking about and could change e.g. in a democratic admin.
All in all though, my personal guess is that its better for data centers to be in space but there are arguments to be made for and against. Seems like a hard call.
Sent draft on DM—I prefer to keep this non-public both because my employer needs to review this before it goes out and also because I would like a few people to find my biggest errors before I put it out there. But I aim to get this posted publicly in the next couple of weeks. Thanks!
I mean if you can move DCs and production/mining/etc. to space that’s a solid win for AI safety? We then basically delineate AI and the only human-inhabitable planet we know about. That’s a heavy lift though, but maybe water on that one moon of Uranus (?) and other parts could be assembled off-Earth. This is literally galaxy brain thinking but something I feel might be worth pursuing, or at least showing AIs that it might be cheaper for them to pursue off-Earth living than engage in uncertain and high-cost conflicts on Earth. Maybe they don’t care about time, and would be happy to build towards this over the next 1000 years instead of spending valuable compute and industrial capacity to prepare for AI-human conflict.
Happy to read a draft! We also looked a sea-based data centers, SMRs, and permitting/buildout arbitrage in other nations. My current thinking is that you’ll see a lot of friction but its possible in principle to scale energy up, perhaps to the tune of hundreds of GW/yr even if only using solar. The more fundamentally binding constraint to me seems to just be chip production but thats not to say that these various bottlenecks don’t at least partially bind or create friction at various points. You’d probably have a situation in hyperscalers are water flowing down hill, pivoting to the next best way to scale compute, then I think that eventually just goes to space. Given the vested interest of SpaceX and SpaceX’s longterm plans for lunar industrial base then Dyson Swarm construction I expect they’ll invest heavily in making them work. Seems to me they will probably successful in making ODCs viable and you’d see this dynamic where space prices are falling while headwinds for terrestrial buildout worsen. Many uncertainties remain however, difficult to forecast Starship scaling timelines. The regulatory environment is also currently favorable but untested at the scales we’re talking about and could change e.g. in a democratic admin.
All in all though, my personal guess is that its better for data centers to be in space but there are arguments to be made for and against. Seems like a hard call.
Sent draft on DM—I prefer to keep this non-public both because my employer needs to review this before it goes out and also because I would like a few people to find my biggest errors before I put it out there. But I aim to get this posted publicly in the next couple of weeks. Thanks!
I mean if you can move DCs and production/mining/etc. to space that’s a solid win for AI safety? We then basically delineate AI and the only human-inhabitable planet we know about. That’s a heavy lift though, but maybe water on that one moon of Uranus (?) and other parts could be assembled off-Earth. This is literally galaxy brain thinking but something I feel might be worth pursuing, or at least showing AIs that it might be cheaper for them to pursue off-Earth living than engage in uncertain and high-cost conflicts on Earth. Maybe they don’t care about time, and would be happy to build towards this over the next 1000 years instead of spending valuable compute and industrial capacity to prepare for AI-human conflict.