SpaceX · Elon Musk · FCC · Nvidia · Ars Technica
SpaceX’s orbital data centers would create a new category of e-waste
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Elon Musk’s talk about maintaining a million-strong AI data center satellite megaconstellation may not exactly be practical or economical, but it might be unique.
Key facts
- The 180 kilograms of cobalt could be recovered from an asteroid about 3 to 6 meters
- That includes 1,000 tons of copper, 170 kilograms of gold, almost 2 tons of silver, over 20 tons each of bismuth and titanium, over 2 tons of palladium, and 76 kilograms of thallium
- But it would take a 140–190-meter asteroid to collect that much copper, something in the 225–300-meter range for an equivalent amount of silver and barium, and something like a 530-meter asteroid
- Given the roughly five-year expected lifetime for data center GPUs, about 200,000 of the 1 million proposed SpaceX AI1 satellites would be decommissioned each year
Summary
The commercial space sector likes talking about the allure of mining asteroids for precious metals to bring back to Earth. Given the roughly five-year expected lifetime for data center GPUs, about 200,000 of the 1 million proposed SpaceX AI1 satellites would be decommissioned each year. Without full, detailed specifications for these satellites, there’s no way to properly tally the amount of material they're talking about. Musk has described these satellites as using a modified Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 rack, which contains 72 GPUs.