Starcloud

> As conduction and convection to the environment are not available in space, this means the data center will require radiators capable of radiatively dissipating gigawatts of thermal load. To achieve this, Starcloud is developing a lightweight deployable radiator design with a very large area - by far the largest radiators deployed in space - radiating primarily towards deep space...

They claim they can radiate "633.08 W / m^2". At that rate, they're looking at square kilometers of radiators to dissipate gigawatts of thermal load, perhaps hectares of radiators.

They also claim that they can "dramatically increase" heat dissipation with heat pumps.

So, there you have it: "all you have to do" is deploy a few hectares of radiators in space, combined with heat pumps that can dissipate gigawatts of thermal load with no maintenance at all over a lifetime of decades.

This seems like the sort of "not technically impossible" problem that can attract a large amount of VC funding, as VCs buy lottery tickets that the problem can be solved.

FWIW there's a reason that Sweden has a bunch of datacenters in the north that are peanuts compared to hosting in Virginia.

They're "poorly" connected (by virtue of being a bit out of the way), but the free cooling and power from renewables make them extremely attractive. There was a time where they were the favourite of crypto-miners for the same reason as they would be attractive to AI training farms.

Fortlax has some I believe; https://www.fortlax.se

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As for the meat of the paper. Anyone with a passing understanding of space will be quick to point out that:

A) Heat is a problem in space, it's either way-way-way to hot (IE; you're in the path of the Sun) or it's way-way-way too cold (IE; you're out of the sun) and the shift between the two means you need to build for both. You also can't dissipate heat as there's no air to take the heat away.

B) Power is not so abundant and solar panels degrade; a huge amount of satellite building is essentially managing a decline in the capability of hardware. That's part of why there are so many up there.

C) Getting reasonably sized hardware up there is beyond improbable, though I'll grant you that most of the weight in a computer is the cooling components and chassis.

D) Cosmic Rays. No electromagnetic barrier from earth and extremely tight lithographies. I mean... there's a reason NASA is still using CPU's measured in the megahertz range.

But I agree with your general point. At 100°C, you can radiate about 1kW/m^2. That’s 1000m^2 of radiator per MW of datacenter, assuming you can operate with the radiator at 100°C. You can fudge this a bit with a heat pump (to run the radiator hotter, paying a linear-ish power penalty and gaining a fourth-power radiation benefit), but that’s expensive and that power isn’t free.

Here on Earth, you can cool by conduction or evaporation, which isn’t an option in space.