>Because you don’t run a (or several) 42MW natural gas generator without a big fat natural gas pipe.
at 40KWh/kg and 50% efficiency you'd need 2 tons/hour for a 42MW generator, which is a one large tanker per day. Thus you can do without gas pipeline which is a big advantage over electric wires and other static infra when you need to scale power quickly.
Sidenote - it all brings memories of how 34 years ago i worked couple months in a Siberia village powered by working 24x7 gas turbine from a helicopter.
Vs. the original article - i doubt that supersonic core is the best. Supersonic engine is designed to get a significant pressure from ram effect. Until supersonic speed reached, such an engine has bad efficiency due to low compression - that is why Concorde was accelerating to supersonic speed on afterburners (atrocious efficiency just to get to efficient speed as fast as possible). The modern engines from say 787 - they have high compression and best high temp mono-crystal blades, etc. - would be much better.
Ultimately AI comes from space :) Just wait until Starship starts flying - with its projected $/kg launch costs the placement of solar + GPUs in space would be the cheapest option (10-20kg is 1 GPU, 5 m2 solar and 2 m2 radiator (at 70C radiating away 1.5 KW) - total launch cost would be around paltry $1-2K) .
you see my numbers in my comment. I don't see any numbers in your comment (please don't give any links to the articles whose authors don't understand black body radiation formula and thus reference ISS cooling in datacenter discussion :)
I'd really like to see the math on this one. It implies that building wind and solar on Earth is somehow worse than building it in space _and_ moving the data center there? It's not just counter-intuitive, it's bonkers.
you need to look at numbers instead of intuition - intuition naturally gets us wrong when we deal with unfamiliar things like space.
A ready 10 ton house will cost $500K-1M to place in a well developed area - the cost of land itself, communications, permits, also delays and unpredictability of process, etc. Add to that yearly taxes. Add tremendous electricity costs in case of the datacenter. And all those costs have and will be growing.
Launching 10 tons on Starship - sub-$1M and that cost will drop down to about $100K-200K.
> It implies that building wind and solar on Earth is somehow worse than building it in space _and_ moving the data center there?
at 40KWh/kg and 50% efficiency you'd need 2 tons/hour for a 42MW generator, which is a one large tanker per day. Thus you can do without gas pipeline which is a big advantage over electric wires and other static infra when you need to scale power quickly.
Sidenote - it all brings memories of how 34 years ago i worked couple months in a Siberia village powered by working 24x7 gas turbine from a helicopter.
Vs. the original article - i doubt that supersonic core is the best. Supersonic engine is designed to get a significant pressure from ram effect. Until supersonic speed reached, such an engine has bad efficiency due to low compression - that is why Concorde was accelerating to supersonic speed on afterburners (atrocious efficiency just to get to efficient speed as fast as possible). The modern engines from say 787 - they have high compression and best high temp mono-crystal blades, etc. - would be much better.