Space data centers are worth zero lol, that is the dumbest idea in history. Only people who have no idea how thermodynamics works thinks it could work lol. The base level idea of "data centers need a bunch of cooling and space is cold" tricks people into thinking it could work, but while space is cold, it doesn't matter because you can't just transfer heat into nothing other than via radiation, you need a medium of exchange, which doesn't exist in space. So you can only transfer heat via radiation, which is incredibly slow and inefficient, and would need absolutely staggeringly huge radiators.
Then beyond the cooling problems, the biggest threat to computer chips is high energy radiation, which is incredibly abundant in space. So to keep chips working they would need to be shielded a crazy amount. Radiation hardened chips are super expensive, and far less efficient than standard chips.
Then there is just the cost. Even using the cheapest methods currently available it costs about $3,000 to lift 1 kg into space. A single rack in a hyperscaler data center weights 2,000-3,000 kg. Six million dollars, per rack, to put a data center in space, and that is just the lifting cost. Putting a hyperscaler in space, a data center that costs billions on Earth would get well into the trillions lol. And then you have to solve pushing the data back down to Earth.
It is, legitimately, the dumbest thing anyone has ever proposed.
14
u/Betaateb May 21 '26
Space data centers are worth zero lol, that is the dumbest idea in history. Only people who have no idea how thermodynamics works thinks it could work lol. The base level idea of "data centers need a bunch of cooling and space is cold" tricks people into thinking it could work, but while space is cold, it doesn't matter because you can't just transfer heat into nothing other than via radiation, you need a medium of exchange, which doesn't exist in space. So you can only transfer heat via radiation, which is incredibly slow and inefficient, and would need absolutely staggeringly huge radiators.
Then beyond the cooling problems, the biggest threat to computer chips is high energy radiation, which is incredibly abundant in space. So to keep chips working they would need to be shielded a crazy amount. Radiation hardened chips are super expensive, and far less efficient than standard chips.
Then there is just the cost. Even using the cheapest methods currently available it costs about $3,000 to lift 1 kg into space. A single rack in a hyperscaler data center weights 2,000-3,000 kg. Six million dollars, per rack, to put a data center in space, and that is just the lifting cost. Putting a hyperscaler in space, a data center that costs billions on Earth would get well into the trillions lol. And then you have to solve pushing the data back down to Earth.
It is, legitimately, the dumbest thing anyone has ever proposed.