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arxivcs.DCcs.AI2026-07-15

The Cost and Network Limits of Space-Based AI Compute

Kees van Berkel

This paper evaluates whether large-scale AI data centers deployed in low-Earth orbit (LEO) could become a cost-effective alternative to terrestrial facilities. The analysis compares orbital and ground-based systems across launch cost, power generation, cooling, radiation exposure, and atmospheric reentry, as well as compute-network performance. A key distinction is the shift from terrestrial Clos networks to space-based mesh networks using laser inter-satellite links. Using bisection bandwidth, bisection intensity, and roofline-style models, we show that while LEO-based inference may be feasible, training frontier-scale LLMs in orbit is unlikely to be competitive with terrestrial data centers.

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MDTransformer: A Hardware-Software Co-Design of Mode-Division Photonic Transformer Accelerator with Inverse-Designed Coherent Crossbar

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Recently, photonic transformer accelerators (PTAs) have successfully achieved significant speedup and energy efficiency improvements over electronic accelerators for expediting Transformer inference. However, state-of-the-art rely on expensive multi-wavelength light generation an…

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arxivcs.CRcs.AI2026-07-31

MOSAIC: Masked Outsourcing of Secure AI Computations

James Hsin-yu Chiang, Sheila Zingg, Kari Kostiainen, Srdjan Capkun

We address the challenge of securely and efficiently outsourcing AI computations from a trusted but computationally weak client to an untrusted but powerful server, in the setting where the client holds both the input and the model, and the server must learn neither. We present M…

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