https://www.rte.ie/news/2025/0619/1519280-eu-israel/

cross-posted from: rss.ponder.cat/post/210840

Where’s the best place for a datacenter? It’s an increasing problem as the AI buildup continues seemingly without pause. It’s not just a problem of NIMBYism; earthly power grids are having trouble coping, to say nothing of the demand for cooling water. Regulators and environmental groups alike are raising alarms about the impact that powering and cooling these massive AI datacenters will have on our planet.

While Sam Altman fantasizes about fusion power, one obvious response to those who say “think about the planet!” is to ask, “Well, what if we don’t put them on the planet?” Just as Gerald O’Niell asked over 50 years ago when our technology was merely industrial, the question remains:

“Is the surface of a planet really the right place for expanding technological civilization?”

O’Neill’s answer was a resounding “No.” The answer has not changed, even though our technology has. Generative AI is the latest and greatest technology on offer, but it turns out it may be the first one to make the productive jump to Earth Orbit. Indeed, it already has, but more on that later, because you’re probably scoffing at such a pie-in-the-sky idea.

There are three things needed for a datacenter: power, cooling, and connectivity. The people at companies like Starcloud, Inc, formally Lumen Orbit, make a good, solid case that all of these can be more easily met in orbit– one that includes hard numbers.

Sure, there’s also more radiation on orbit than here on earth, but our electronics turn out to be a lot more resilient than was once thought, as all the cell-phone cubesats have proven. Starcloud budgets only 1 kg of sheilding per kW of compute power in their whitepaper, as an example. If we can provide power, cooling, and connectivity, the radiation environment won’t be a showstopper.

Power

There’s a great big honkin’ fusion reactor already available for anyone to use to power their GPUs: the sun. Of course on Earth we have tricky things like weather, and the planet has an annoying habit of occluding the sun for half the day but there are no clouds in LEO. Depending on your choice of orbit, you do have that annoying 45 minutes of darkness– but a battery to run things for 45 minutes is not a big UPS, by professional standards. Besides, the sun-synchronous orbits are right there, just waiting for us to soak up that delicious, non-stop solar power.

Sun Synchronous Orbit, because nights are for squats. Image by Brandir via Wikimedia.

Sun-synchronous orbits (SSOs) are polar orbits that precess around the Earth once every sidereal year, so that they always maintain the same angle to the sun. For example, you might have an SSO that crosses the equator 12 times a day, each time at local 15:00, or 10:43, any other time set by the orbital parameters. With SSOs, you don’t have to worry about ever losing solar power to some silly, primitive, planet-bound concept like nighttime.

Without the atmosphere in the way, solar panels are also considerably more effective per unit area, something the Space Solar Power people have been pointing out since O’Neill’s day. The problem with Space Solar Power has always been the efficiencies and regulatory hurdles of beaming the power back to Earth– but if you use the power to train an AI model, and send the data down, that’s no longer an issue. Given that the 120 kW array on ISS has been trouble-free for decades now, we can consider it a solved problem. Sure, solar panels degrade, but the rate is in fractions of a percent per year, and it happens on Earth too. By the time solar panel replacement is likely to be the rest of the hardware is likely to be totally obsolete.

Cooling

This is where skepticism creeps in. After all, cooling is the greatest challenge with high performance computing hardware here on earth, and heat rejection is the great constraint of space operations. The “icy blackness of space” you see in popular culture is as realistic as warp drive; space is a thermos, and shedding heat is no trivial issue. It is also, from an engineering perspective, not a complex issue. We’ve been cooling spacecraft and satellites using radiators to shed heat via infrared emission for decades now. It’s pretty easy to calculate that if you have X watts of heat to reject at Y degrees, you will need a radiator of area Z.The Stephan-Boltzmann Law isn’t exactly rocket science.

Photons go out, liquid cools down. It might be rocket science, but it’s a fairly mature technology. (Image: EEATCS radiator deployment during ISS Flight 5A, NASA)

Even better, unlike on Earth where you have changeable things like seasons and heat waves, in a SSO you need only account for throttling– and if your data center is profitable, you won’t be doing much of that. So while you need a cooling system, it won’t be difficult to design. Liquid or two-phase cooling on server hardware? Not new. Plumbing cooling a loop to a radiator in the vacuum of space? That’s been part of satellite busses for years.

Aside from providing you with a stable thermal environment, the other advantage of an SSO is that if one chooses the dawn/dusk orbit along the terminator, while the solar panels always face the sun, the radiators can always face black space, letting them work to their optimal potential. This would also simplify the satellite bus, as no motion system would be required to keep the solar panels and radiators aligned into/out of the sun. Conceivably the whole thing could be stabilized by gravity gradient, minimizing the need to use reaction wheels.

Connectivity

One word: Starlink. That’s not to say that future data centers will necessarily be hooking into the Starlink network, but high-bandwidth operations on orbit are already proven, as long as you consider 100 gigabytes per second sufficient bandwidth. An advantage not often thought of for this sort of space-based communications is that the speed of light in a vacuum is about 31% faster than glass fibers, while the circumference of a low Earth orbit is much less than 31% greater than the circumference of the planet. That reduces ping times between elements of free-flying clusters or clusters and whatever communications satellite is overhead of the user. It is conceivable, but by no means a sure thing, that a user in the EU might have faster access to orbital data than they would to a data center in the US.

The Race

This hypothetical European might want to use European-owned servers. Well, the European Commission is on it; in the ASCEND study (Advanced Space Cloud for European Net zero Emission and Data sovereignty) you can tell from the title they put as much emphasis on keeping European data European as they do on the environmental aspects mentioned in the introduction. ASCEND imagines a 32-tonne, 800 kW data center lofted by a single super-heavy booster (sadly not Ariane 6), and proposes it could be ready by the 2030s. There’s no hint in this proposal that the ASCEND Consortium or the EC would be willing to stop at one, either. European efforts have already put AI in orbit, with missions like PhiSat2 using on-board AI image processing for Earth observation.

You know Italians were involved because it’s so stylish. No other proposal has that honeycomb aesthetic for their busy AI bees. Image ASCEND.AWS Snowcone after ISS delivery. The future is here and it’s wrapped in Kapton. (Image NASA)

The Americans, of course, are leaving things to private enterprise. Axiom Space has leveraged their existing relationship with NASA to put hardware on ISS for testing purposes, staring with an AWS snowcone in 2022, which they claimed was the first flight-test of cloud computing. Axiom has also purchased space on the Kepler Relay Network satellites set to launch late 2025. Aside from the 2.5 Gb/s optical link from Kepler, exactly how much compute power is going into these is not clear. A standalone data center is expected to follow in 2027, but again, what hardware will be flying is not stated.

There are other American companies chasing venture capital for this purpose, like Google-founder-backed Relativity Space or the wonderfully-named Starcloud mentioned above. Starcloud’s whitepaper is incredibly ambitious, talking about building an up to 5 GW cluster whose double-sided solar/radiator array would be by far the largest object ever built in orbit at 4 km by 4 km. (Only a few orders of magnitude bigger than ISS. Not big deal.) At least it is a modular plan, that could be built up over time, and they are planning to start with a smaller standalone proof-of-concept, Starcloud-2, in 2026.

You can’t accuse Starcloud of thinking small. (Image Starcloud via Youtube.)
A closeup of one of the twelve “Stars” in the Three Body Computing Constellation. This times 2,800. Image ADA Space.

Once they get up there, the American and European AIs are are going to find someone else has already claimed the high ground, and that that someone else speaks Chinese. A startup called ADA Space launched 12 satellites in May 2025 to begin building out the world’s first orbital supercomputer, called the Three Body Computing Constellation. (You can’t help but love the poetry of Chinese naming conventions.)

Unlike the American startups, they aren’t shy about its capabilities: 100 Gb/s optical datalinks, with the most powerful satellite in the constellation capable of 744 trillion operations per second. (TOPS, not FLOPS. FLOPS specifically refers to floating point operations, whereas TOPS could be any operation but usually refers to operations on 8-bit integers.)

For comparison, Microsoft requires an “AI PC” like the copilot laptops to have 40 TOPS of AI-crunching capacity. The 12 satellites must not be identical, as the constellation together has a quoted capability of 5 POPS (peta-operations per second), and a storage capacity of 30 TB. That’s seems pretty reasonable for a proof-of-concept. You don’t get a sense of the ambition behind it until you hear that these 12 are just the first wave of a planned 2,800 satellites. Now that’s what I’d call a supercluster!

A man can dream, can’t he? Image NASA.

High-performance computing in space? It’s no AI hallucination, it’s already here. There is a network forming in the sky. A sky-net, if you will, and I for one welcome our future AI overlords. They already have the high ground, so there’s no point fighting now. Hopefully this datacenter build-out will just be the first step on the road Gerry O’Neill and his students envisioned all those years ago: a road that ends with Earth’s surface as parkland, and civilization growing onwards and upwards. Ad astra per AI? There are worse futures.

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From Blog – Hackaday via this RSS feed

As Israel and Iran trade blows in a quickly escalating conflict that risks engulfing the rest of the region as well as a more direct confrontation between Iran and the U.S., social media is being flooded with AI-generated media that claims to show the devastation, but is fake.

The fake videos and images show how generative AI has already become a staple of modern conflict. On one end, AI-generated content of unknown origin is filling the void created by state-sanctioned media blackouts with misinformation, and on the other end, the leaders of these countries are sharing AI-generated slop to spread the oldest forms of xenophobia and propaganda.

If you want to follow a war as it’s happening, it’s easier than ever. Telegram channels post live streams of bombing raids as they happen and much of the footage trickles up to X, TikTok, and other social media platforms. There’s more footage of conflict than there’s ever been, but a lot of it is fake.

A few days ago, Iranian news outlets reported that Iran’s military had shot down three F-35s. Israel denied it happened. As the claim spread so did supposed images of the downed jet. In one, a massive version of the jet smolders on the ground next to a town. The cockpit dwarfs the nearby buildings and tiny people mill around the downed jet like Lilliputians surrounding Gulliver.

It’s a fake, an obvious one, but thousands of people shared it online. Another image of the supposedly downed jet showed it crashed in a field somewhere in the middle of the night. Its wings were gone and its afterburner still glowed hot. This was also a fake.

The AI Slop Fight Between Iran and Israel

There’s a lack of footage from the conflict and AI-generated content is filling the void.

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

https://thehill.com/latino/5359169-pregnant-us-citizen-border-patrol-agents/

A scene I came home to: my wife had just finished playing a journaling RPG about attempting to preserve a library from ransacking hordes in the distant past, involving both blocks and cards. And I saw it all, and the scene composed itself. Nothing was disturbed in the slightest.

I just think this is very pleasing and cozy to look at.

Sensitive content Clicca per aprire/chiudere

cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/5307804

NRK^[Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation] will discontinue its teletext service on August 20 due to the risk of serious technical issues. Over the course of the past few years, the service has become increasingly difficult for NRK to maintain. The technology is old and very demanding to keep in working order with the rest of NRK's system.

—"Most people are surprised when they find out that teletext still exists. But we know there are still some people who use it to this day," says Audun Aas, product development manager for nrk.no.

Aas says that NRK is doing its best to help teletext users find the information they're used to receiving through the service, elsewhere.

NRK's teletext service celebrated its 40th anniversary two years ago. During the service's 30th anniversary, it was predicted not to last another decade.

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::: spoiler Did you know?
* Black and white TV sets were still common in 1983. NRK had a monopoly on TV broadcasts, but no way to provide quick updates on news and other information.
* Teletext was initially only available for a few hours in the evening, namely from the children's programming block to the end of broadcasts before midnight.
* Because the terminals NRK used to type teletext were imported from England, the letters Æ and Ø had to be replaced with Ä and Ö in teletext respectively.
* A typo in a teletext warning about toxins in blue mussels caused many Norwegians to fall ill in the summer of 1994.
* The invitation to the NRK teletext editorial staff's 10 year anniversary — including the event's bill of fare — was accidentally shown on teletext, prompting an apology via Dagbladet^[Newspaper associated with the Liberal Party until 1977. Sold from the Berner Group to Aller Media in 2013.].
* Teletext was for many years most popular among 20-39 year olds.
:::

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42 years of teletext

The Norwegian parliament resolved in April of 1982 that NRK would establish a teletext service. The service launched on February 2, 1983.

Establishing a teletext service proved to be such a daunting task that the chief editor of Arbeiderbladet^[Newspaper today known as Dagsavisen. Associated with the Labor Party at the time; became party-independent in 1999 and is now owned by Mentor Media.] was brought on to lead the work.

Surveys show that use of teletext has gradually declined in recent years, with only 3% of Norway's population using teletext as of 2024.

On August 20, 2025, the service will end after 42 years.

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::: spoiler Poll: Will you miss teletext?
* Yes, I like having it available as an option: 29%
* No, I won't miss it: 40%
* Yes, but only due to nostalgia: 31%

3,566 votes

NB: This poll is not representative of the entire country. These are only the votes of people who read this article and decided to vote.
:::

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[There's a video from 1979 attached here explaining what teletext is, but I don't feel like translating it right now. The key takeaway is maybe that NRK was already experimenting with teletext by that point, but hadn't officially launched their service yet.]

All information currently available on teletext is also available on nrk.no.

Slutt for tekst-TV etter 42 år

NRK legger ned tekst-TV fra 20. august. Avvikler tjenesten på grunn av faren for alvorlige feil.

^{Anna Rut Tørressen (NRK)}

The United States and China are entangled in what many have dubbed an “AI arms race.”

In the early days of this standoff, US policymakers drove an agenda centered on “winning” the race, mostly from an economic perspective. In recent months, leading AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic got involved in pushing the narrative of “beating China” in what appeared to be an attempt to align themselves with the incoming Trump administration. The belief that the US can win in such a race was based mostly on the early advantage it had over China in advanced GPU compute resources and the effectiveness of AI’s scaling laws.

But now it appears that access to large quantities of advanced compute resources is no longer the defining or sustainable advantage many had thought it would be. In fact, the capability gap between leading US and Chinese models has essentially disappeared, and in one important way the Chinese models may now have an advantage: They are able to achieve near equivalent results while using only a small fraction of the compute resources available to the leading Western labs.

There can be no winners in a US-China AI arms race

AI competition is not a zero-sum game. Instead, the world’s superpowers need to work together to make sure AI benefits humanity.

^{Alvin Wang Graylin and Paul Triolo (MIT Technology Review)}

As Israel bombs Iran, and the threat of U.S. military escalation grows by the hour, the world’s attention is being pulled into yet another war that Israel started and the West manufactured. After flattening Gaza and locking down the West Bank Israel has now dragged Iran into open confrontation — and is calling on the U.S. to finish the job.