Kristian Stout Quoted in Daily Caller on Orbital Data Centers
Daily Caller News Foundation quoted Kristian Stout, ICLE Director of Innovation Policy, in a piece AI companies’ interest in orbital data centers as communities and lawmakers resist new land-based facilities.
Read the full article here.
“We are going to need more data centers in more places,” Kristian Stout, the director of innovation policy at the International Center for Law & Economics, told Daily Caller News Foundation.
Stout added that AI labs may face more pressure to explore orbital data centers due to Americans’ dislike of their presence in their communities.
“The constraint is that right now it’s kind of the best proven case is like in the kilowatts, like low kilowatts of capacity, and we’re talking about putting up like 200 megawatt data centers on the ground. It’s very speculative right now is proven like it works, but it doesn’t work at the hyperscale level,” Stout remarked, arguing that orbital data centers would not match the raw power of data centers on Earth.
“Cooling is actually complicated because in space you don’t radiate heat into the vacuum; there’s no medium. So, they need to have specialized radiators on these things in order to radiate away the heat,” Stout said.
Stout questioned if AI labs will have a plan to maintain and repair these orbital satellites. He said that most satellites last five to seven years and then often crash or burn up in the Earth’s orbit.
He asked rhetorically, “Do you take a billion dollars worth of GPUs [AI chips] and just burn them up in the atmosphere in seven years?” He noted that prior generation AI chips have a lot of value and flying the AI chips back to Earth would become very expensive.
Stout said that orbital data centers could help AI companies, but not at the scale of land-based data centers.
“Nobody has really proven that there’s a hyperscaler capability in the near term, so what you’re talking about is like edge computing or modifying existing satellite capabilities for better imaging,” he remarked.