SpaceX’s orbital data centers would create a new category of e-waste

Musk has described these satellites as using a modified Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 rack, which contains 72 GPUs. Though it references a slightly older card, a May study on the material footprint of LLMs provided a full chemical analysis of an A100, covering 32 elements. The massive air-cooled heatsink on that card accounted for 88 percent of its mass, which we’ll simply have to exclude, since the satellite will obviously require another type of cooling that has not been defined. But using the extremely conservative assumption that each AI1 satellite was simply composed of 72 naked A100 GPUs taped together, we can estimate the material exported to space (or vaporized so thoroughly that it might as well have been) each year. That includes 1,000 tons of copper, 170 kilograms of gold, almost 2 tons of silver, over 20 tons each of bismuth and titanium, over 2 tons of palladium, and 76 kilograms of thallium. Some of these elements are, unsurprisingly, rounding errors compared to the amount we mine each year. But that’s around 1 percent of global annual palladium and thallium—a remarkable amount to eject into space. But it would take a 140–190-meter asteroid to collect that much copper, something in the 225–300-meter range for an equivalent amount of silver and barium, and something like a 530-meter asteroid for an equivalent amount of tin. Again, this would have to be repeated annually to balance the losses from the satellite constellation. Most of these elements are too low in value to be proposed targets for asteroid mining, but it has been suggested that spacecraft materials like aluminum and titanium might someday be mined in space for use in space. SpaceX suggested a variant of this in an SEC filing: “We intend to establish lunar‑based manufacturing capabilities, including factories to produce large‑scale AI compute satellites[…] We expect to use raw materials from the Moon to construct most of the mass of the satellites and ship chips and other lower mass elements from Earth.” It’s technically possible to mine aluminum and titanium on the Moon. It doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s cheaper to manufacture satellites on the Moon just because it would reduce the weight launched from Earth’s surface. (Of course, you’d first have to launch an entire moonbase and mining operation and satellite factory up there…) There are a number of questions about all this that one would not have to answer if one were building servers on Earth, deploying them in data centers inside humble buildings, and responsibly processing e-waste for recycling in a few years when they die of email-summary-related causes. (Or even better, pushing some equipment to the secondary market if it has useful life left.) In addition to the cost of putting something in orbit, there is a cost to not getting it back. Will there someday be an environmental review for space projects that includes an evaluation of the mass of materials it proposes to remove from the Earth system? The legal framework for extracting minerals from space has been much-discussed—but congested orbits full of junk (or junk reentering the atmosphere) may not be the only space disposal concern on the horizon if projects of this size are ever seriously pursued.