Musk to Build Space Data Center, Nvidia's Jensen Huang Says Lack of Air Flow Requires Considerably Large Heat Sinks

IT House February 27 News, Elon Musk plans to build a space data center. In January, SpaceX applied to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a one-time launch of up to 1 million satellites, aiming to establish an “orbital data center” network in Earth’s orbit. The project will create a “satellite constellation with unprecedented computing power” to support advanced AI models and related applications.

During NVIDIA’s earnings call on February 26, NVIDIA President and CEO Jensen Huang discussed the feasibility of space data centers.

Huang said that although the current economic environment is not ideal, it will improve over time.

He believes that the operating environment in space is very different from that on Earth: space has abundant solar energy and plenty of space; from a cooling perspective, space is extremely cold, but there is no air flow, so the only way to dissipate heat is through conduction. Therefore, we need to build quite large heat sinks. Liquid cooling is obviously not feasible because it is too heavy and complex. As a result, the methods used on Earth need to be adjusted for space.

Huang also mentioned that many computing tasks are actually very suitable for space. NVIDIA’s Hopper architecture is the first GPU in the world to go to space. One of the best applications of GPUs in space is high-resolution imaging: using optical systems and AI for re-projection from different angles, image denoising, enabling large-scale, high-resolution, ultra-fast imaging. If massive image data is transmitted back to Earth for processing, it is inefficient and time-consuming; processing data directly in space is more efficient, allowing us to filter out useless information and only transmit images when interesting content is detected.

Huang concluded by expressing his belief that AI technology will have very interesting and highly potential applications in space.

According to IT House reports earlier, in early February, SpaceX announced the acquisition of Musk’s AI startup xAI, making it the world’s most valuable private company. The core purpose of this merger is to build space-based data centers. Musk believes that deploying space-based data centers requires continuous launches of a large number of satellites, which can also ensure that SpaceX will achieve more stable and larger-scale ongoing revenue in the foreseeable future.