this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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My question is always how the hell are you going to cool them. Do you know hard it is to move heat in a vacuum?
The problems; plural; is that the person who popularized the idea of data centers in space has little to zero understanding of any of the space sciences and yet owns and directs one of the world's largest, and privately owned, aerospace companies with massive government contracts that splits its time with their own AI work.
How would you power them?
The surface area of solar panels exceeds the surface area needed for radiators to cool everything.
In space I would imagine you'd find the perfect sandwich ratio. One bun solar, one bun radiators, the meat being the racks.
Have you never seen a movie set in space? Evrytime someone gets sucked into space they freeze. You saying every movie got it wrong?? Space is cold. Duh.
Easy, just create a long heat sink and dangle it in the earth’s atmosphere. Now we are winning!
From that to a space elevator...
Raditors. Starlink v3 can in theory already shed (edit 20) kW of heat. But they would need to figure out how to 5x that and keep things profitable.
It would be 20kW for each rack or two. The types of data centre deal they talk about these days are measured in GW of compute. That's 50,000x just for 1GW.
These aren't big things, they're small satellites. They're going to be ~100kW. They only need to 5x the existing radiator they think will work.
With radiators just like with every existing satellite system.
https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI&t=12m57s
Very large scale datacenters would likely have some nasty fluid handling problems to solve.
I'll just note that I am not a fan of putting internet infrastructure in space. I think polluting the upper atmosphere with a bunch of metals every time a satellite deorbits will certainly have negative consequences. So IMO space should be limited to things we can't do with earthbound infrastructure.
And you can only build so many of those radiator panels before you start running into congestion problems. You don't want them radiating onto each other.
The area of radiator needed directly corresponds to the amount of power harvested by the solar panels. It doesn't matter what the load is. So a compute frame with the same amount of solar panels as the space station would need approximately the same radiatot area as the ISS, unless you are bringing nuclear power into the mix.
I agree that space based datacenters are a bad idea, but the thermals really are not the gotcha people are making them out to be.
The solar panels needed is another problem for the space data center fantasy. Once you put together all the mass over enough surface area to make it work, you would blot out the sun worldwide.