this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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Starlink satellites carry antennae. That's all they are. Not serious computational equipment.
Edit: so his power argument is mostly fine. Different components do dissipate different amounts of heat at the same power. Antennae will not run as hot as GPUs, the fact they radiate power by design helps here. However, even if you could use all a v2 satellite's power generation for compute, you need 35 sattelites per MW of compute. So at the lowest estimate 35000 for a GW data centre. For 2024 data centre capacity (47 GW computed from 415 TWh used) you need around 1.6 million sattelites. Now you need to network a vast cloud to get reasonable inter GPU performance.
The required orbit would probably mean a whole strip of earth gets insane light pollution, due to the reflectivity of so many sattelites jammed into the narrow orbit. Note that each satellite is about as bright as a star visible to the naked eye.
Edit edit: The lifetime of a data centre GPU is around 1-2 years for serious uptime. The sattelites are meant to have a 5 year lifetime.
Which is why Musk had proposed putting into orbit a million plus sats
Right, but that's just for present compute capacity in the most optimistic scenario. Neglecting anything realistic, and the fact that starlink cooling isn't actually sufficient (the sattelites have low power downtime to cool). On top of that the GPUs still die faster than the sattelites and you can't just walk over and replace them in the rack. Let alone the end of ground-based astronomy or light pollution.
It's already sufficent to cool 20kw of compute.
When starship goes up it'll be crazy cost effective to throw them up in orbit and do compute there then to waste the time, money and power on earth