Subject: ?Elon Musk's first-gen orbital data center craft spans wider than a Boeing 747 and runs an interchangeable chip payload ? AI1 satellite compute payload is 120 kW, peaks at 150 kW?
?Elon Musk's first-gen orbital data center craft spans wider than a
Boeing 747 and runs an interchangeable chip payload ? AI1 satellite
compute payload is 120 kW, peaks at 150 kW?
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/spacex-details-its-ai1-compute-satellite
?A satellite with these specs comes with some serious space
requirements, and its 70-meter deployed wingspan edges past the
68.4-meter span of a Boeing 747-8. As for the interchangeable compute,
that leaves the platform open to whichever vendor ships the most
competitive AI silicon, rather than locking it to a single supplier.?
?This interchangeability is no doubt important to Musk, not least
because SpaceX can?t yet guarantee its own supply of chips. The company
is currently building Terafab, a chip fab that?s running as a joint
venture with Tesla, while its S-1 IPO filing warns it can?t currently
secure enough chips.?
?That aside, the elephant in the room is cooling: a rack on Earth sheds
heat into moving air and circulating water, neither of which exists in a vacuum, where the only viable route is radiating it away as infrared.
AI1 features up to 110 mư of deployable liquid radiators, as well as
redundant pumping loops and integrated micrometeroid shielding. By
comparison, the International Space Station?s ETACS rejects roughly 70
kW of heat ? around half of what?s needed to cool a 140 kW GB300 rack ?
across 422 mư of radiator at a cost of up to $500 million, according to SemiAnalysis.?
Lynn
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