Why waste heat will force compute off Earth
From Data Centers in Space: The Future of AI Compute on Deeptech Decoded, with Philip Johnston.
Transcript
Right now they're generating petabytes of imagery of green forest and have to wait till it gets to the ground before running inference. In future, they'll ship it to us.
We run inference, and in near real time they can download the insight — "there is a fire in this location moving in this direction." Instead of waiting an hour and a half, you might wait one second.
Got it. I'm gonna slowly phase out so people can talk to you. My very last question: what is the most contrarian thinking you hold in this space that still surprises people?
One thing people aren't really aware of: there will come a time — within our lifetimes, probably the next 50 years — where building data centers on Earth becomes impractical. Even if we solve nuclear fusion and have nearly free unlimited energy...
The sheer waste heat from these data centers would be enough to warm the earth to the point of boiling oceans. It's on the order of 10 to 100 times the current energy capacity we're using for data centers.
Whether we like it or not, if we want to scale compute beyond a certain point, we'll have to build in space — the only place you can dissipate that heat into the cosmic background.
