Recently, the startup Lumen Orbit wants to amplify its moves, and the company wants to move its data centers to space and build AI supercomputers in space. Lumen Orbit has gotten Y Combinator's investment is to launch its first satellite next year, with GPUs 100 times more powerful than all previous GPUs sent into space.

Bringing AI supercomputers to space

According to Lumen Orbit's plan, they plan to launch 300 satellites and deploy them in low-Earth orbit to build a network similar to Starlink. This network is not designed to provide direct Internet services, but to provide users with processed data – which can be understood as a "portable hard drive" service located in space.

However, Lumen Orbit's vision goes far beyond that. They aim to send an AI supercomputer with powerful computing power into space, enabling the perfect combination of unlimited computing power and storage space regardless of physical location.

According to Lumen According to Orbit's information published in its white paper, the company plans to launch its first satellite next year. The satellite will carry the most powerful computing unit of all the GPUs sent into space to date, with 100 times the power of existing technology. With this breakthrough, Lumen Orbit expects to further expand into the space cloud computing and edge computing markets.

Efficient cooling and continuous energy supply in the space environment

In outer space, the average ambient temperature is about -270°C. If you can take advantage of this low temperature to design a heat dissipation system, this method is not only simpler, but also more efficient than traditional electrical cooling.

In addition, high-intensity solar energy can be obtained in space all year round. According to Lumen According to Orbit, the average capacity factor of ground-based solar farms in the United States is only 24 percent, while space solar arrays have a capacity factor of more than 95 percent and are not affected by seasonal or weather changes.

This means that in space, the energy output of a solar array will be more than five times that of the same array on the Earth's surface. As the cost of space launches continues to decrease, the operating costs of such projects will not be much higher in the long run compared to terrestrial data centers.

Lumen Orbit also emphasizes the scalability of the space environment and the long life and high stability of the equipment. These advantages help alleviate the problems faced by the planet such as power shortages, water shortages, and environmental pollution.

In addition, with the increasing shortage of low-earth orbit resources, the amount of data generated by low-earth orbit satellites is increasing, but the time window for data transmission remains unchanged, making it difficult for some data to be transmitted back to the ground in time. Therefore, it has become especially necessary to set up a data center in space.

Except for Lumen Orbit, several other companies are also exploring the possibility of putting data centers into orbit, including some domestic commercial space companies.

It's not easy to go to space

Despite Lumen Orbit has acquired Y, a well-known start-up investment firm Combinator and closed a $2.4 million funding round this year, but the real wind in the commercial space sector is yet to come. Lumen There are still many challenges in Orbit's grand picture.

For reference, a domestic team working on a similar project pointed out in an interview with the media that the cost of building a space data center would be at least 1 billion yuan. And according to current public reports, Lumen Orbit's funding allocation involves the construction of supporting factories, the research and development of large GPU clusters, and many other expenses, and it is doubtful whether there will be enough funds to support satellite launches in the future.

In the space environment, due to the lack of air, spacecraft cannot rely on heat conduction and heat convection to dissipate heat, but can only rely on thermal radiation, which is a relatively slow process. As a result, existing spacecraft are often equipped with a large area of heat sinks. Lumen Orbit plans to use heat sinks to manage the satellite's heat issues, but their cost-effectiveness remains to be verified as the specific heat sink design has not yet been announced.

In addition, terrestrial data centers require regular physical maintenance, while in space, data centers will be more expensive to maintain. Even if robots or automated systems are used for maintenance, human intervention is still required, and this is still a difficult problem to overcome.

Another important issue is radiation protection in space. Electronic components are subject to single event effects (SEE) and total dose effects (TIDs), which can lead to degraded device performance over time. Especially for advanced manufacturing processes, it can be more challenging to maintain stable operation in a space environment.

Overall, while the concept of building a data center in space is very appealing, as with many commercial space projects, the technical complexity and long payback period of the project make it difficult to apply in practice. In contrast, an undersea or polar data center may be more viable.