r/IsaacArthur • u/tomkalbfus • 6d ago
Solar Powered Data Centers on the Moon
Here's an idea of what the Moon could be used for. Solar powered data centers to power AI. You have multi-megawatts of solar panels powering data centers for training AIs, these data centers are accessed with the 1 1/3 second light lag, all the power stays on the Moon, it is just the results of the AI queries that are beamed back to Earth, the solar energy is used on site, thus not taking up valuable real estate on Earth.
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u/NearABE 6d ago
Data centers need coolant.
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u/AnswerFit1325 5d ago
This is a solvable problem. (Just like we did for the ISS and satellites.)
Honestly, we could just lump the data centers into orbit too.
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u/NearABE 5d ago
It is solvable. It just requires a huge radiator. It is certainly not impossible to have data centers on Luna. It is just much easier to put one in the Arctic or Antarctic.
In orbit the photovoltaic panel can shade off the Sun. Radiators behind it can radiate heat in multiple directions.
On Earth’s poles we have multiple options for fluids. Water and air stand out as exceptionally cheap since they are already flowing around.
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u/Sesquatchhegyi 5d ago
I do not really see any advantage, to be honest. Only disadvantages.
Real estate on Earth is dirt cheap compared to the cost of creating an infrastructure on the Moon. Access to energy is probably 10-100x cheaper on Earth then on the moon (again, you have to bring everything "up" and create a whole energy plant out of nothing.
getting rid of access heat is more difficult than here.
And we have not even got into the issue of maintenance. Say you have a datacentre of 100.000 GPUs and you have dozens of GPUs dying every year. Here on earth you may pay a hundred dollars per hour in wages to replace them and maximum 10 dollars shipping cost per GPU (probably a lot less). On the moon? you can multiply it by a minimum of 10x (if Starship is fully operational), or rather 100x.
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u/Spirited-Permit-7171 5d ago
You can use kuka robots going on rails, removing damaged sets. The only future I see is whereby everyone has a personal super computer the size of a cellphone and a personal Ai
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u/tomkalbfus 5d ago
Real Estate on Earth isn't cheap, just ask the Russians about that, they've paid a high price to gain their sliver of Ukraine. People live on Earth, there is ecological impact, there is regulations while the Moon has "Magnificent Desolation", no one lives on the Moon, it is empty of people to object to whatever you are doing on Moon, that is the beauty of it, no ecofreaks getting in your way, no ecology to damage, perfect for strip mining. No one is selling Lunar real estate, its free for the taking, and we have robots to do the labor, remember what this is for, to build a data center. You don't need humans to build it, solar panels are low maintenance, you don't need somebody in a hard hat to fix something, that is why solar panels are used in satellites. Have as few moving parts a possible, no wear and tear, no dust storms on the Moon.
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u/Sesquatchhegyi 5d ago
I did not say real estate on Earth was cheap. I said it was dirty cheap compared to the cost of creating infrastructure on the Moon. Please do check the price of solar panels used in space vs solar panels used here. On the moon you can expect a temperature difference of almost 300 Celsius degrees. "Normal" solar panels are calibrated to withstand a maximum of 120 Celsius degrees. They also do not like extreme UV radiation. The price difference per kWh can be 100-1000x , not even taking into account the cost of installation. You are trying to solve a problem which does not really exist, with something that would only add more problems.
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u/tomkalbfus 2d ago
Who then maintains the solar panels on Earth orbiting satellites, do astronauts go up there to maintain them and see to it that they are operating properly? Seems to me solar panels are used because they are low maintenance, they are passive structures without moving parts, now a space nuclear reactor would have moving parts and need maintenance! People talk about using nuclear reactors to power data centers on Earth, that means someone's got to work in them!
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u/SoberGin Paperclip Maximizer 6d ago
I mean... potentially? I just don't think "AI Training" will ever be large enough for the entire moon to be dedicated to it.
Iterative generation has some niche uses, but the overwhelming failure of generative AI to find any sort of profitable use, alongside its mass unpopularity, shows it'll ultimately not be too useful. The things it would be useful for are things which either would be better if it just used an actually-programmed intelligence that could dynamically adapt (whereas a machine made using iterative generation will be hyper-specialized towards its specific training data) or which are extremely unpopular and morally dubious, like stealing human artwork for the sake of sidestepping paying creatives for their work.
So while yes, that would be a viable use for the moon infrastructure-wise, it would not be due to generative AI likely never being useful enough to be worth dedicating the space for it. Those same benefits would work for essentially any industry which lacks earth-specific inputs and produces detrimental pollution.
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u/Anely_98 5d ago
Heat would probably be a bigger problem than getting power in this case. The Moon is a vacuum, with no atmosphere or liquids available in large quantities to dissipate the heat produced, which would mean you would need HUGE radiators.
High-quality chips like those needed for data centers are also very difficult to produce, the cost of creating the infrastructure needed to produce them on the Moon would be VERY high.
I don't think it would be worth it, at least not in the medium term, it makes more sense to use the lunar industry to produce space solar energy collectors and launch them into orbit, where they are much more efficient, and transmit the energy produced to Earth where it could be used for various functions, including powering data centers.
It would only make sense to build datacenters on the Moon after the Earth was saturated with the heat produced by datacenters and industry in general, which we are not even remotely close to yet, and even then it would probably make more sense to launch them into orbit using mass drivers on the Moon where they could work more continuously, since in orbit you can use a solar panel as a radiator and vice versa, while on the Moon you have to use radiators separate from the solar panels and with a smaller temperature difference, therefore less efficient, in addition to the problem of the lunar night and the fact that solar energy is more efficient in orbit due to the lack of curvature of the Moon to spread sunlight over a larger area, and the advantage of greater proximity reducing light lag.
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u/Forever_DM5 5d ago
To what end? AI as it exists in ChatGPT and other LLMs isn’t going to produce novel breakthroughs. This would be a waste of lunar infrastructure
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u/kmoonster 6d ago
Sure, why not? Just make sure to have a whole network so you have panels online no matter which part of the Moon's rotation is happening at a given time.
Antennae you can get away with only have ones on the Earth-facing side of the Moon, but if your power is Solar keep in mind that any one part of the Moon spends half its time in night same as we do on Earth (except that night is two weeks long, and that low-angle sun lasts a few days on each end of dusk and dawn)
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u/CmdrJonen 6d ago
What is your solution for powering the things during the lunar night?
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 6d ago
There are plenty of options already from thermal/electric batteries to nuclear to putting the equipment near the poles where we can put tall PV towers to get near-perpetual sunlight.
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u/ILikeScience6112 5d ago
Very good idea. Small problem that we’d need a Moon colony first and it’s so expensive to do that it must be orders of magnitude cheaper to do it here. We’re not going there without an economic reason, ever. Colonists need to pay their way like everyone else. Don’t despair. We can do it, we just need to wanna.
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u/Wise_Bass 5d ago
The equipment is rather sensitive to radiation, so you'd have to bury them in a lot of regolith or put them in lava tubes. They also produce a lot of waste heat, so you'd have to either have some immense heat sinks that can release heat during the long nights or put them in an area where permanent shadow is nearby to dump waste heat into the ground.
TBH given the intermittency of the sunlight due to the days, it's not that great of a location for it. Orbital would be better, since the sunlight could be continuous.
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u/tomkalbfus 5d ago
Data centers don't have to operate continuously., you can turn them on and off as needed. You also can store energy as heat.
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u/MiamisLastCapitalist moderator 6d ago
This could only be useful for AI training, not inference operation.
Still though, that may be worth it in some circumstances. Imagine creating even better AGIs and ASIs in the cold of Titan.
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u/NearABE 6d ago
The lunar poles are as cold as Titan. The advantage on Titan is the atmosphere, methane lakes, and a connected methane aquifer. The data centers can be submerged in the lake. This maintains the temperature at methanes boiling point. The entire surface of the moon can act as radiator. The methane rains out and flows back to the lake.
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u/AnswerFit1325 5d ago
It's not enough to just submerge in water (or other cooling fluid). You have to pump the heat away. This often requires a mechanical system to move the heat-bearing fluid and then exchanging the heat with other heat-bearing fluids. (Like how your air conditioner works.)
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u/NearABE 5d ago
When a liquid boils the bubbles rise.
There are advantages to going deep under the fluid to increase contact pressure. If you are talking about “pump” as in moving the liquid like an irrigation system instead of relying on just convection then sure. That is a trivial amount of energy compared to the amount consumed by the chip.
If you mean “pump” as in a “heat pump” then no you do not need that. Water boils at 373K at 1 bar atmospheric pressure. That is hotter than air cooling and not good enough. Methane boils at 112K. If you want really intense heat exchange methane has a critical point at 191K and 45 bar pressure. 191K is still -83C.
Titanian industry might still use heat pumps but it would be for making liquid nitrogen. 77K liquid and a critical point at 126K and 34 bar. We can keep the entire loop at near 35 bar and have liquid nitrogen flow in and supercritical nitrogen flow out.
Methane and ethylene have the advantage of adsorbing onto a graphene or diamond surface. Diamond’s thermal conductivity is much higher than silicon in a silicon computer chip. The heat sink can have the diamond (or graphene, carbon allotrope nitrogen boride etc) extend further from the chip. There hydrocarbon chains can be permanently attached to the surface. Lattice vibrations would transfer to the hydrocarbon and then to the methane. The carbon acts as a wick with a sheet of liquid methane sliding along the surface until it gets hot and boils off. Isotopically pure diamond or graphene has an even higher thermal conductivity.
Carbon tetrafluoride is also liquid in Titan’s temperatures.
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u/luchadore_lunchables 5d ago
This could only be useful for AI training, not inference operation.
How come?
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u/Weerdo5255 5d ago
You have 3 seconds of lag time minimum, that's without any compute time for whatever the request is. Presuming that the user who is interfacing with the program is on Earth.
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u/tomkalbfus 5d ago
The 1.3 second time delay between the Earth and the Moon isn't so bad, waiting 2.6 seconds to get the answer isn't always unreasonable, chat bots often take longer to figure things out when they are right here on Earth. The point is data centers require megawatt of electricity, the produce their own demand for electricity, so that gets around the problem of beaming the energy to Earth, if the data centers are in space right next to the solar collectors where the energy is obtained, so all you need to do is transmit the question to the data center and when the data center figures it out, it transmits its answer back to Earth. The time delay between Earth an moon is trivial compared with the time it takes to figure out the answer.
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u/SoylentRox 6d ago edited 6d ago
The reason to do this is there would be no NIMBYs and no environmental regulations and no laws obstructing self replicating factories.
No laws but the laws of nature of course - we need substantially better technology to do this. Self replicating robots and a supply chain compact enough to launch it in rockets to the Moon.
Some of the exports other than trained AI models and AI hosting would be medical services - delivered perhaps in deregulated cities on earth like Prospera or in orbital habitats over earth (in permanent orbits maybe 1000km up).
This is where the most cutting edge medical treatments would be available, where the medical board is a committee of ASIs and the laws are written with the help of AI and all laws expire automatically if not renewed.
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u/MerelyMortalModeling 6d ago
If we had the ability to send self replicating systems to the moon we would almost certainly extend our legal system to fully cover the Moon.
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u/SoylentRox 5d ago
Who's "we".
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 5d ago
whatever governments funded the sending of the equipment in the first place. Or the governments the companies come from. Or just whatever government feels like it and has the military strength to impose their will as is the case everywhere on earth. That's kinda just how laws work and why lawlessness tends to be a fairly transient state
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u/SoylentRox 5d ago
Oh. Yeah but environmental, zoning, medical services, and other laws wouldn't apply.
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 5d ago
environmental sure but i don't see any reason why governments wouldn't enforce their own medical laws. tbh you really want someone to. medical laws exist for a reason and just like OSHA regs those laws are usually written in blood.
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u/SoylentRox 5d ago
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 5d ago
That's probably one of the more benign things that medical laws cover. I mean sure and human experimentation can get a lot darker. Especially where consent is concerned, but its also nice to have some amount of quality control over the production of drugs, medical equipment, and who's allowed to practice medicine.
Also dude's a billionaire. They're already largely above the law here on earth. They don't need to go off-earth to ignore regulations.
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u/SoylentRox 5d ago
My point is that orbital habitats are newly created land and might get an economic advantage through regulatory arbitrage like hong kong does.
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 5d ago
That's a fair point and tbh even if they are subject to laws its unlikely to be all the same laws. Like i can see why you would want to mess with some heavily modded GMO crop capable of outcompeting just about any plant on earth on earth. In a space habitat its just not a real concern. that applies to a ton of different technologies. and not just in habitats but in automated or teleoperated facilities where the safety of personnel isn't a concern for tge testing of dangerous/unstable/energetic technologies
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u/Itsmesherman 6d ago
Im not sure what the advantage is to having the data centers on the moon, vs orbital data centers. The moon will almost certainly become and industrial hub if we ever want to do any amount of large scale space activity, so definitely processing the materials to make a data center is something I can see us doing on the moon, but as far as the benefits of actually having the data center there it seems like it would make more sense to have it both closer to earth and somewhere where the sun can shine on it uninterrupted. Though, presumedly if there was a large human/post human presence on the moon, they would have local data centers for their own use.