Thread | Brutkey

A blunt assessment of "AI datacenters in space” by Prof. Matthew Buckley in Dec 2025 -

"To be blunt, the entire stupid idea is a giant middle finger to multiple fundamentals of physics, and the fact that it is apparently being taken seriously by our tech lords, mainstream journalism, and political leaders is a damning indictment of not just the ridiculous amount of money chasing bad ideas in the tech/LLM/hype sector that has eaten the American economy, ..."

https://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2025/12/11/the-dumbest-thing-ive-seen-this-week
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Image of the top of the article -

The Dumbest Thing I’ve Seen This Week
December 11, 2025

Given that it is 2025, the dumbest thing I’ve seen this week is some stiff competition, but “AI datacenters in space” is some impressive idiocy. I’ve seen a few breathless media reports on how AI companies are planning to launch entire datacenters into space. Some of these articles point to a single H100 GPU that was used to train a LLM while in orbit. Obviously, humanity has the capacity to launch a single GPU into orbit, and small LLMs can be trained on an H100. However, that’s a far cry from a datacenter, and so it is somewhat surprising that this is being hyped by companies who are selling the idea of massive datacenters in orbit.

To be blunt, the entire stupid idea is a giant middle finger to multiple fundamentals of physics, and the fact that it is apparently being taken seriously by our tech lords, mainstream journalism, and political leaders is a damning indictment of not just the ridiculous amount of money chasing bad ideas in the tech/LLM/hype sector that has eaten the American economy, political power centers, and people who really should know better, but yet another demonstration of how people who built their economic empire on a claim of STEM-based rigor and quantitative genius either can’t do basic physics or know that no one out there who matters is going to call them on it.

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Another good article by a former NASA engineer/scientist on why "Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea."

"This is an absolutely terrible idea, and really makes zero sense whatsoever. There are multiple reasons for this, but they all amount to saying that the kind of electronics needed to make a datacenter work, particularly a datacenter deploying AI capacity in the form of GPUs and TPUs, is exactly the opposite of what works in space."

https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/
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