It’s better than having your DC confiscated (by Putin, in Russia), or bombed (in Ukraine, by Russia). As some hyperscalers realized.
Datacenters in space aren't going to work
61–70 of 447 posts
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#62If you think about it, all the existing data centers are in space already. They're just attached to a big ball of rock, water, and air that acts as a support system for them, simplifying cooling and radiation protection.
If humans are going to expand beyond the Earth, we'll certainly need to get much better at building and maintaining things in space, but we don't need to put data centers in space just to support people stuck on the ground.
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Moon doesn't have a magnetic field, though, so the second half of the article discussing difficulties due to radiation would still apply, right?
Not if you bury it in regolith. That’s an idea for a Lunar base too. The design is called “Hobbit holes.” Bury the occupied structures in piles of basically any local mass you can bury them in. It’s another huge problem for orbit though. Shielding would add a ton of mass and destroy the economics.
Lunar regolith is so abrasive that digging holes or tunnels isn't going to be cost effective.
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#64The one thing that space has going for itself is space. You could have way bigger datacenters than on Earth and just leave them there, assuming Starship makes it cheap enough to get them there. I think it would maybe make sense if 2 things: - We are sure we will need a lot of gpus for the next 30-40 years. - We can make the solar panels + cooling + GPUs have a great life expectancy, so that we can just leave them up…
Space is not much of an issue for datacenters. For one thing, compute density is growing; it's not uncommon for a datacenter to be capacity limited by power and/or cooling before space becomes an issue; especially for older datacenters.
There are plenty of data centers in urban centers; most major internet exchanges have their core in a skyscraper in a significant downtown, and there will almost always be several floors of colospace surrounding that, and typically in neighboring buildings as well. But when that is too expensive, it's almost always the case that there are satellite DCs in the surrounding suburbs. Running fiber out to the warehouse district isn't too expensive, especially compared to putting things in orbit; and terrestrial power delivery has got to be a lot less expensive and more reliable too.
According to a quick search, StarLink has one 100g space laser on equipped satellites; that's peanuts for terrestrial equipment.
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#65Regardless of how terrible an idea it is, I wouldn't mind some billionaires funding R&D that advances the state of the art in thermal management in space.
Perhaps Elmo can move his toxic, illegal, cancer inducing, gas generators there, instead of doing it in Memphis.
https://tennesseelookout.com/2025/07/07/a-billionaire-an-ai-...
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#66I asked Google for more information about AI datacenter in space. This was the first sentence, 'AI data centers are being developed in space to handle the massive energy demands of AI, using solar power and the vacuum of space for cooling.' > After laughing at "the vacuum of space for cooling" I closed the page because there was nothing serious there. Basic high school physics student would be laughing at that senten…
You can radiate the excess energy away on the non-sun facing part. In theory.
I wonder if there should be levels of "in theory". Yes theoretically black body radiation exist and well stuff cools down to near background radiation via that. But the next level is theoretical implementation. Like actually moving around the heat from source and so on. Maybe this could be the spherical cow step...
Reminds me of the hyperloop. Well yes, things in vacuum tube go fast. Now does enough things go fast to make any sense...
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#67What about on the Moon? My understanding is that heat is the killer. There you could sink pipes into the surface and use that as a heat sink. There are “peaks of eternal light” near the poles where you could get 24/7 solar power. Latency becomes high but you send large batches of work. Probably not at all economical compared to anywhere on Earth but the physics work better than orbit where you need giant heat sinks.
You'd have most of the problems of building in space, an abrasive quasi-atmosphere of dust, half a month of darkness every month, and not as good of a heat sink as the Earth's atmosphere.
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Launching a datacenter like that carries an absurd cost even with Starship type launchers. Unless TSMC moves its production to LEO it's a joke of a proposal. Underwater [0] is the obvious choice for both space and cooling. Seal the thing and chuck it next to an internet backbone cable. > More than half the world’s population lives within 120 miles of the coast. By putting datacenters underwater near coastal cities, d…
I like the underwater idea did not think of that
The problem is a lot of people like the underwater idea and I’m worried we’re heading towards something like literally boiling the ocean as they say.
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#69As someone with a similar background to the writer of this post (I did avionics work for NASA before moving into more “traditional” software engineering), this post does a great job at summing up my thoughts on why space-based data centers won’t work. The SEU issues were my first though followed by the thermal concerns, and both are addressed here fantastically. On the SEU issue I’ll add in that even in LEO you can s…
The only advantage I can come up with is the background temperature being much colder than Earth surface. If you ignored the capex cost to get this launched and running in orbit, could the cooling cost be smaller? Maybe that's the gimmick being used to sell the idea. "Yes it costs more upfront but then the 40% cooling bill goes away... breakeven in X years"
Re: Datacenters in space aren't going to work
#70Google’s paper [1] does talk about radiation hardening and thermal management. Maybe their ideas are naive and it’s a bad paper? I’m not an expert so I couldn’t tell from a brief skim.
It does sound to me like other concepts that Google has explored and shelved, like building data centers out of shipping container sized units and building data centers underwater.
[1] https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/suncatcher_paper.p...