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.

Earth’s neighborhood inconvenience store

Another way to think about this is to calculate the size of asteroid you would have to mine to recover the amounts of these elements being lost. As a 2023 study notes, there are only a few elements that can be found at a higher concentration in asteroids compared to ores on Earth, like the platinum group metals.

Using average chemistry and densities for a couple different types of asteroids—common CM-group carbonaceous chondrites and rarer iron-rich M-type asteroids—some of the elements lost could be found in modestly sized bodies. The platinum, for example, equates to the contents of an asteroid 16 to 43 meters in diameter. The 180 kilograms of cobalt could be recovered from an asteroid about 3 to 6 meters across.