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Comment by airza | Hacker News Reader

it wasn't ignored on HN, there were many articles correctly noting that building data centers in space is a stupid stupid idea because cooling things there is infeasible

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Google, Blue Origin and at least 5 other smaller companies have announced plans to build data centers in space. My understanding is the cooling issue is not the show stopper you assume.

yup, bezos said "we will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades". presumably this means they'll need huge ass radiators, so its all about bringing down launch costs since they'll need to increase mass.

Was doing some back of the envelope math with chatGPT so take it with a grain of salt, but it sounds like in ideal conditions a radiator of 1m square could dissipate 300w. If this is the case, then it seems like you could approach a viable solution if putting stuff in space was free. What i can't figure out is how the cost of launch makes sense and what the benefit over building it on the ground could be

What temperature were you assuming?

Because the amount of energy radiated varies with the temperature to the fourth power (P=εσT^4).

Assuming very good emissivity (ε=0.95) and ~75C (~350K) operating temperature I get 808 W/m2.

They would most likely launch with TPUs designed for space and target lower temperatures, closer to 60C.

I was adding some generous padding and rounding up. I assume they'd try to get it to operate as hot as possible

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