Ted Seides

In our last conversation, Gavin said data centers in space will be the most important thing in 3-4 years. He explains that means "racks in space" and thinks orbital compute will solve the watts shortage: "When people hear data centers in space, they picture a Pentagon-sized building in space. That's not what it is. A Blackwell rack weighs 3,000 pounds. It's eight feet high. Four feet deep. Three feet wide. It's racks in space. It has these solar wings that are probably 500 feet long on each side. You keep it in a Sun-synchronous orbit, so those solar panels are always in the sun. And then because it's in an exactly Sun-synchronous orbit, the radiator, which extends behind it for hundreds of feet is in the shade. You link these racks using lasers traveling through vacuum which are already on every Starlink. SpaceX operates the world's largest satellite fleet, which is 98 or 99% of all satellites in orbit. Every Starlink, they're cooling it today. I think Starlink V3 is going to operate at 20 kilowatts. A Blackwell rack is only 100 kilowatts. And people talk a lot about density. Well, if you're connecting the racks with lasers through vacuum, you can make the rack bigger physically. In space, there's all sorts of things that SpaceX can do. They also now operate the largest data center on Earth. I've spent a lot of time at Starbase over the years, and I've talked to a lot of SpaceX engineers. It is the most talented group of engineers on planet Earth, and they're very confident they have solved this."