What Was Larry Page Asked About Orbital Compute?

Martin Casado heard that someone asked Larry Page how much compute will be orbital. Page said five nines, because it is just physics and eventually all of it will be in space. Putting computing in space also pencils out, and regulation is the reason the move makes the most sense.

Power, chips, and materials are the real constraint. With that limit, 80% goes to the scale providers and 20% goes to hard-to-reach, niche places, including his relationship with a government that has the power. A GPU marketplace he met was running many of its GPUs in converted chicken sheds and chicken coops on farms. The market is so large that a significant portion never makes sense for operators like SpaceX, and SpaceX is not going to create a marketplace of chicken coop GPUs. The 20% is large enough for a wide, fragmented array of providers, while the 80% of the market becomes homogenous scale providers like SpaceX. There are 500 proposed legislations to stop data center building in the United States alone, including Texas. He has heard from many of the top data center people that breaking ground is very tough right now. If the regulatory pressure continues and builders cannot break ground, they go international or into space.