Musk has described these satellites as utilizing a modified Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 rack, which comprises 72 GPUs. Although it references a barely older card, a May study on the fabric footprint of LLMs supplied a full chemical evaluation of an A100, masking 32 parts. The large air-cooled heatsink on that card accounted for 88 % of its mass, which we’ll merely need to exclude, for the reason that satellite tv for pc will clearly require one other kind of cooling that has not been outlined.
However utilizing the extraordinarily conservative assumption that every AI1 satellite tv for pc was merely composed of 72 bare A100 GPUs taped collectively, we will estimate the fabric exported to house (or vaporized so completely that it would as nicely have been) every year.
That features 1,000 tons of copper, 170 kilograms of gold, virtually 2 tons of silver, over 20 tons every of bismuth and titanium, over 2 tons of palladium, and 76 kilograms of thallium.
A few of these parts are, unsurprisingly, rounding errors in comparison with the amount we mine each year. However that’s round 1 % of worldwide annual palladium and thallium—a exceptional quantity to eject into house.
Earth’s neighborhood inconvenience retailer
One other approach to consider that is to calculate the scale of asteroid you would need to mine to get well the quantities of those parts being misplaced. As a 2023 study notes, there are just a few parts that may be discovered at the next focus in asteroids in comparison with ores on Earth, just like the platinum group metals.
Utilizing common chemistry and densities for a pair various kinds of asteroids—widespread CM-group carbonaceous chondrites and rarer iron-rich M-type asteroids—a few of the parts misplaced may very well be present in modestly sized our bodies. The platinum, for instance, equates to the contents of an asteroid 16 to 43 meters in diameter. The 180 kilograms of cobalt may very well be recovered from an asteroid about 3 to six meters throughout.
