Altman Torches SpaceX's Space Data Center Dreams
OpenAI CEO calls orbital data centers 'ridiculous' and dismisses the concept scaling this decade.
Sam Altman isn't buying the orbital compute hype. The OpenAI chief bluntly called the idea of putting data centers in space "ridiculous" and said it's "not something that's going to matter at scale this decade."
His target? Elon Musk's SpaceX, which has been pushing plans to launch satellites that would function as data centers in orbit.
The concept sounds cool on paper — unlimited solar power, natural cooling from the vacuum of space, no land constraints. But Altman clearly thinks the engineering and economics don't add up. Not now, anyway.
It's a sharp jab at Musk's ambitions from the head of the company that arguably needs more compute than anyone else on the planet. When the guy burning through GPUs faster than anyone says space data centers are a fantasy, it carries some weight.