Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers

Post by cucumber3732842 » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

PowerfulWizard wrote: post #44

tristanj wrote: post #5

Economics calculator for Orbital vs Terrestrial Data Centers https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters You can play around with the cost sliders to estimate the economics, but even being quite optimistic, space data centers cost ~2-3x of their terrestrial counterparts.

To remove heat by radiation there's a big benefit to running the GPUs hotter as the radiation will be proportional to the fourth power of temperature. This resource is using 85 deg C versus 60 deg C for OP which will improve cooling performance. If Nvidia/SpaceX can make the chips run at a higher temperature that would help a lot although I assume it would have already been done if it were possible. Another option is…

Post by CamperBob2 » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

arjie wrote: post #24

CuriouslyC wrote: post #7

Honestly, data centers in the ocean make so much more sense than data centers in space it's kind of silly, but Mr Moneybags owns a rocket company he's trying to pump and dump, not a submarine company, so here we are.

What’s the regulatory path to something like this? Oceans seem to have all the problems of land except manifold: permitting is nigh impossible, and power is hard to line up. To make it worse, underwater tech is notoriously hard to make operationally visible. Sabotage is trivial and undifferentiable from failure and honest error. When we used to work in trading subsea cable cuts in Asia would constantly ruin our best…

Post by cyberlimerence » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #7

Honestly, data centers in the ocean make so much more sense than data centers in space it's kind of silly, but Mr Moneybags owns a rocket company he's trying to pump and dump, not a submarine company, so here we are.

Post by elcritch » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #7

Honestly, data centers in the ocean make so much more sense than data centers in space it's kind of silly, but Mr Moneybags owns a rocket company he's trying to pump and dump, not a submarine company, so here we are.

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

elcritch wrote: post #67

CuriouslyC wrote: post #7

Honestly, data centers in the ocean make so much more sense than data centers in space it's kind of silly, but Mr Moneybags owns a rocket company he's trying to pump and dump, not a submarine company, so here we are.

A startup I worked at is building wave-powered data centers [1]. 1: https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/catalyst-building-inferen...