Iran struck Amazon data centers again amid widening war, satellites show
… Three Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were already previously damaged by Iranian drone strikes on March 1. …
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The physics challenges of orbital data centers are formidable but not insurmountable. Let’s start with radiation, a concern with all space hardware. Based on its experience with the Starlink constellation, SpaceX has found that many of the required computing components, such as processors and memory, are already fairly radiation-tolerant. Sam Waldman, a physicist who worked at SpaceX from 2012 to 2018 on avionics for various programs, including Starlink, said power supplies and other components are more vulnerable to radiation, but there are known techniques to address the issue. SpaceX has le
How hard is it to build orbital data centers, actually?… Three Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were already previously damaged by Iranian drone strikes on March 1. …
… But a new report from Amazon highlights just how little water all these AI data centers are using in aggregate, on a relative basis, even as individual data centers can strain local water supplies. …
… That may explain the turn to unusual schemes such as offering homeowners the chance to host mini data centers , along with more quixotic proposals such as launching orbital data centers into space and floating AI data centers in the middle of the ocean. …
Amazon’s cloud customers will need to wait several more months before the US tech company can repair war-damaged data centers and restore normal operations in the Middle East. …
… There is some evidence that the kinds of chips used in conventional data centers on Earth can function in space, with modifications. One of the first companies to seriously consider space-based data centers is a small startup called Starcloud, and it’s banking on the technology becoming practical. …
… Silicon Valley-based Cowboy Space will use the funding to develop its own rocket to put data centers into orbit. Cowboy up … The company’s vision sounds familiar. Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have each announced plans to use their own rockets for launching orbital data centers. …
… The national resistance to data centers Despite the oversight gaps, the Texas moratorium on data center approvals “throws a massive wrench into ERCOT’s plans to bring data centers online,” according to E&E News . …
… Although some data center projects were removed from residential zones due to noise complaints, communities have largely benefited from letting data centers in, with lower tax rates and more affordable housing. This week, Meta claimed a similar data center PR win in Louisiana. …
… Amazon told Ars that it’s exploring the use of solar energy and battery storage at the Texas data center but plans to rely on gas turbines in the meantime. xAI’s head start on gas-powered data centers In a recent report , Cleanview flagged 59 data centers “with a combined capacity of ~90 GW that pl… …
… Lee also questioned whether it’s necessary to downsize data centers to the “granularity of a few GPUs” in order to reduce their burden on the power grid. He speculated that deploying conventional 20-megawatt data centers instead of 1-gigawatt hyperscale data centers could prove similarly beneficial. …