Don’t data-centers require massive cooling?
Yes, and it’s easier to cool things on earth. In space, there’s no air to help you cool thinks off, you can only reject heat through radiation. Most spacecraft are carefully designed to reflect heat/light on surfaces facing the sun and refect heat into empty space from surfaces that are shaded.
Naive question, but would bit-flip also be a problem without the atmosphere to shield (some) radiation?
Thats not a naive question at all. You’re totally right. The term to learn about this is “rad-hardened computing”. It’s a solved problem, but the solution involves a buttload of redundancy and extra silicon with huge performance reductions compared to non-hardened tech.
It’s less of an issue if you’re in the shadow of the sun but still quite a big issue.
Maybe for a space based population a data center in space would work. This is just taking off site hosting too far.
Shame you can’t do some sort of thermoelectric power generation thingie with all the heat from these data centres.
You can’t turn pure heat into useful energy. Thermoelectric generators tap into the transfer of heat between a hot reservoir and a cold reservoir.
There’s another problem that nobody mentions. Putting thousands of additional satellites into space would seriously increase the risk of Kessler Syndrome occurring.
This isn’t true for low orbit items. They will come down on their own in ~5 years.
At the absolute worst case scenario, we’d be blocked or ~5 years. Maybe 10 years if they put it a little higher.
Collisions in LEO can chuck debris into orbits which intersect higher orbits. If one of those collides with something in in said higher orbits, you have a problem.
It’s possible it could go to a higher orbit, but we don’t have mega constellations in those orbits. I don’t know enough to know how far something could get flung up either, but I suspect if you’re in a 5y orbit, you aren’t reaching a 50y orbit area, and probably not even a 10y orbit area.
The idea of putting data centers in low Earth orbit sounds cool at first. It feels futuristic. It feels like something that should be efficient. It is not.
Yes, space is cold. Yes, you get a lot of solar power. Those are the two points everyone repeats. What they leave out is basic physics and cost.
Cooling in space is not free. There is no convection. Heat only leaves through radiation. That means giant radiator panels. AI racks throw off massive heat loads. The more compute you add, the more radiator surface area you need. That adds mass. Mass costs money to launch.
Even with companies like SpaceX driving launch prices down, it is still extremely expensive per kilogram. And servers are not permanent infrastructure. They get replaced every three to five years. You cannot economically upgrade racks in orbit the way you do in a building on Earth.
Then you have radiation. Either you harden the electronics, which makes them slower and more expensive, or you accept higher failure rates and build in heavy redundancy. Maintenance becomes a logistical nightmare. A failed power supply on Earth is a service call. In orbit it is a robotics problem.
Meanwhile hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google put data centers next to cheap power, fiber backbones, and cold climates. It is boring. It is practical. It works. Orbital data centers only make sense if we already have large scale industry in space. We do not.
And what really makes these threads irritating is the obvious rage bait framing. Throw up a clickbait title about AI destroying the planet or Big Tech trying to escape Earth and you attract people who already hate AI. The discussion stops being about engineering and economics and turns into ideological noise.
If someone wants to seriously debate energy efficiency or scaling limits, fine. But pretending near Earth orbit is some obvious solution is not serious analysis. It is a cool sci fi concept. It is not a rational infrastructure strategy.
Dumping heat in space is actually hard to do. You’d need huge radiators for radiative emission cooling.
Before even considering radiation damage, hopium $200/kg launch costs mean 15c/kwh electricity. The you add the cost of specialized panels and radiation emitters. At least 20x that of earthly systems.
Okay, but have you considered how cool it would be to put a data center in space?
What if I told you that we have to BEAT CHINA to space?
BEAT CHINA to space is for sure the magic words, but even better, what I told you to come up with an excuse to merge my space company with my AI company, and even though it is a paper transaction with no money changing hands, increase my wealth by $300B for the price I set!
hmmm… beat china does sound better.
China…CHINA!!
Gotta love the eternal threat of the “yellow peril”
I feel like on part no one ever mentions on things like this are, how do you enforce any jurisdiction on a satellite and what it’s doing.
The main crazy thing about a satellite data enter is you can’t confiscate it and therefore you can’t control it. Hell once it’s up there the only thing any government might be able to do is find the owner and force them to crash it (if possible).
It in a sense sounds a bit like the wild west of the original internet. Admittedly Musk being at the forefront of it all sounds terrible, but I think there is something fascinating about an information hub that could be completely independent of any country.
How do you enforce jurisdiction?
That sounds like a feature, not a bug.
I’m pretty sure that’s the point TBH.
Kinda scary when the context is these kinds of corporate systems, though.
Yeah, that was my point. Like all technology it has potential to liberate communications, but also enable bad actors. However, to me, it’s the biggest reason why this technology would matter at all.
Fair.
I’m pretty sure that’s a plot point in some cyberpunk-ish sci fi.
how do you enforce any jurisdiction on a satellite and what it’s doing.
You threaten to disable it, which would be very easy give how fragile it is
Disabling/destroying a satellite has only been shown to be feasible by a handful of militaries in the world in very controlled situations.
Unless you mean you disable it via commands to the satellite, but that assumes there is a way to disable it and that you know who can disable it and can force them to do so.
As someone who designs and builds networks as a profession, I don’t see this being a great idea. Maybe I just don’t have all the facts.
I am leaning heavily on the example of M$ trying an underwater datacenter, which they decommissioned and have not pursued further. Put a node of compute somewhere and eventually it will become obsolete or unusable due to hardware failure. Not to mention the energy requirements and cooling needed in space. Waste heat does not just dissipate unless it has a heat sink, which adds more volume and mass to the payload!
and cooling needed in space.
Turns out you can’t cool something just by putting it in space because most heat transfers require convection, which requires a medium, say, air… which is notably lacking in space.
Yeah, heat dissipation is surprisingly difficult in space, because the only real way to do it is via radiation. And radiation is one of the least effective methods of dissipating heat.
The vast majority of heat transfer on earth happens via physical contact, in the form of fluids or solids touching each other. That’s what a heat sink is for. It increases surface area, so more fluid (air) can touch it and carry heat away. But without some sort of fluid contact, a heat sink isn’t going to help much. It’ll act as a radiator, but the cooling efficiency will only be a fraction of what is achieved via traditional forced air cooling.
Space ain’t happening.
I can see the point of underwater datacenters though, for some very specific use cases. Compute heavy workloads with high energy densities could possibly make sense to ”free cool” below water. DLC everything and pump the heat straight into the ocean.
The real issue with space-based data centers isn’t just whether they’re a “bad idea” from an engineering perspective; it’s that they represent the ultimate transition toward a vertically integrated, unregulated monopoly. While everyone is focused on the technical hurdles, we need to look at who actually benefits from this shift. For someone like Elon Musk, this isn’t just a project—it’s a way to own the entire global internet stack. Because he owns the “truck” (SpaceX) and the “road” (Starlink), he can launch and link these data centers essentially for free. This creates a market that is so tightly locked into one ecosystem that it can never be challenged by a terrestrial competitor.
From a purely operational standpoint, space turns every earthly liability into a superpower. Data centers on the ground are a nightmare of land taxes, massive water consumption for cooling, and constant strain on local power grids. In orbit, those costs vanish. Heat is radiated into the vacuum for free, and solar power is available 24/7 without weather or night cycles getting in the way. Even the physical security is inherently top-notch because the hardware is literally unreachable. When you combine that with a mesh network like Starlink, the need for laying fiber lines disappears entirely. The user just needs an antenna, and the “gatekeeper” handles everything else in the sky.
The terrifying downside is that this creates a jurisdictional black hole. If a server is orbiting 500km above the Earth, whose laws actually apply to the data stored on it? We’re talking about a “gated community” where the ownership, pricing, surveillance policies, and privacy standards are all controlled by a single entity with zero competition or government oversight.
Once we stop building ground infrastructure and rely solely on the “space cloud,” we lose all leverage. It’s an engineering miracle for the person who owns it, but it’s a democratic nightmare for the rest of us. It’s not just a bad idea; it’s the construction of a digital kingdom that sits physically and legally beyond our reach.
Heat is radiated into the vacuum for free
When you combine that with a mesh network like Starlink, the need for laying fiber lines disappears entirely
Citation needed.
And on water usage, I will point out that gas generators and evaporative cooling are only used on Earth because other methods (geothermal, big radiators, heatpumps) are somewhat more expensive… Not, like, orders of magnitude more expensive like pure radiative cooling in space.
We already radiate heat away just fine in space, it’s just a matter of how much space do you need to use to do it and all the implications of what that would mean for any given satellite. I wouldn’t call it free, because you need the hardware to do it and the extra weight reduces the payload capacity of whatever you’re sending up, but we can do it.
Starlink also uses laser links to talk to each other which these satellites would also use. How they work can depend, but generally they bounce around in space until they can’t, and they might come back down to land, to move somewhere else over fiber to another ground station until they can go back up to reach you. But the more laser links the less they have to come down for technical reason, but they might still come down for bandwidth reason. I don’t really know how likely it is that any given connection is point to point.
Example of what could happen.
Your dish -> starlink -> starlink -> ground station -> Google -> ground station -> starlink -> ground station -> starlink -> groundstation -> starlink -> starlink -> your dish.
Fiber is still the better option on land if you can get it there, but there are a lot of places it’s never going to get laid, and will never be in the air, or on bodies of water.
Edit: Corrections on the laser links with an example.
On radiators, plugging it into this formula:
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/heatrad.php
I get a circular radiator at least a kilometer wide, assuming the radiator is quite efficient, a rather modest datacenter, and very hot coolant (70C).
…Realistically, the coolant temperature would need to be much lower. See how it’s a power of four in the formula? That means the radiator area gets very large real quick.
I cannot emphasize how expensive a functional 1km+ radiator would be in space. It’s mind bogglingly expensive.
If a space datacenter is in LEO like Starlink, then it’s in Earth’s shadow a lot of the time, and would have to be “part” of the starlink network constantly zooming over the ground. If it’s geosynchronous, then laser communication (or any communication) gets real tricky, and latency is limited by the speed of light. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but reliable high data rates would be an expensive engineering challenge.
For 100kW? I’m not going to try and figure things out from that massive site. A pre made calculator would have been nice if they had one.
edit: It is going to be LEO and likely connected to starlink with the same laser link they use.
Edit: Looking at orbits they might use sun synchronous orbits? It might not be in sun 100% of the time, but they are nearly always in sun.
Edit: I have no way to know if this is right, but a couple AI responses are saying for 100kW it would be ~150-170 square meters with temperatures around 70c
100kW? Nvidia BGX 200 servers are 14kW each, not counting the interconnect, or anything else. According to nuggets I’ve read online, we’re talking 200 megawatts for an Earth-based AI datacenter these days, without something exotic like underclocked Cerebras WSEs (which would be pretty neat, actually…)
Plugging 200 megawatts into this:
https://www.calctool.org/quantum-mechanics/stefan-boltzmann-law
I get about 0.46 square kilometers, depending on the coolant temperature, and ultimate efficiency of the system (with how you orient the thing relative to solar panels, how you circulate coolant…)
I have no clue what the construction of such a huge structure would look like, but if it was a simple 0.5 inch aluminum sheet, it would weigh like 15,000 metric tons. Even much thinner, that’s still on the order of “mass of a cargo ship”
Why is that, though?
Well, something like the ISS doesn’t generate much heat, and hypothetical rockets that need big radiators have very hot coolant to dissipate heat quickly. But space data centers are the sinister combination of “tons of waste heat” and “needs a low coolant temperature.”
They aren’t making a datacenter like on earth. They’re putting up a ton of satellites that will each generate about 100kW.
Everyone keeps thinking they’re putting these massive things up there, they are not doing that.
Edit: Oh I missed your tool this time was a real calculator this time, thank you! That says 127 square meters, with black body, 70c and 1 (but no idea if those are good values)
That’s interesting, but what’s the point? If it’s like 2 DGX boxes in each satellite, spaced out, the interconnect between them is going to be very slow, and the individual computational power of each satellite will not be that impressive.
And if you connect them all in one constructed mesh and wire them together, well, you’ve made a 200MW datacenter! The economies remain the same.
If hardware gets more power efficient, well… Then why do you need to go to space anymore?
Heat is radiated into the vacuum for free,
Is it though?
Granted I never made it further than freshman level physics in college but doesn’t heat needs a media to radiate away. Otherwise it just stays in place? So there would be nothing to move the heat away from installation? The ISS uses these big radiators the emit the waste heat as infrared light. That seems like a plausible method to exhaust waste heat. But I don’t have any clue if that can scale up to the level of a huge data center compared to the systems on the ISS
Heat is energy as “vibration of molecules”. It spreads to adjacent molecules by conduction, unless we have other interesting things going on. Easy stuff.
Vacuum is the absence of molecules to conduct heat to.
Wait…
Well, it can also radiate away in the form of EM radiation, typically infrared. That takes time though.
Thoughts?
Pardon my potential ignorance, but I’m under the assumption that radiating heat in vacuum is NOT easy. Normally, heat escapes from sources into the surrounding atmosphere, whereas in space, only radiant heat (IR?) can bleed off into vacuum. The conductive heat from, say, a cycling loop of water still needs a radiator that vents into surrounding volume. Without atmosphere, radiators can’t conduct efficiently, right?
Please set me straight if possible.
I’m no expert, but this is my understanding as well.
These are my thoughts https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-to-people/
Your thoughts were really well written. I’m glad you took the time to explain your viewpoints organically instead of taking an easy way out to avoid having to do it yourself.
How about this for what my post was trying to say…
It’s a good idea to the person who can pull it off. It will be highly profitable and they will monopolize that ecosystem. For the rest of us, if this were ever to become adopted wide spread, it has the potential to make something that normal people can no longer compete with and can’t easily avoid (assuming it is significantly subsidized initially to offset cost and get users to adopt it)
I’m no expert, but I feel like a data center in space is a super niche use case. Bandwidth seems like it would be a major issue. Heat seems like it would as well. And as you said, jurisdiction would be a problem that many businesses wouldn’t necessarily want to contend with.
While the devices are difficult to get to physically, should an adversarial state actor send something up, it’s not like we could stop them from accessing the devices in a way we could if they were within the borders of a country. They’re harder to reach for smaller adversaries, and significantly easier for bigger ones. Not to mention significantly harder for us to repair if something goes wrong.
I’m not saying data centers in space are a bad idea in general, but I am not seeing a huge benefit to them right now.
Interestingly NASA had an idea of a plan that sounds at least technically possible, but it’s a multi-decade operation and doesn’t look anything like what the current startups are pitching. Of course you can have your data centers in space, why the fuck not, but a data center sits on top of a lot of boring old infrastructure which nobody’s excited to talk about.
It’s going to be prohibitive if you have to pay the gravity tax every time you want to move 1 ton of metal, so realistically this kind of high-tech project cannot even begin without having substantially industrialized the moon. Nothing fancy but you’ll need at least some mining and refining, and solid trans-lunar logistics routes. Probably some housing for a bit of personnel too. At that point the space data center would be dwarfed by the size of its own support system.
I mean, making fuel is one thing. A future where we can manufacture electronics and spaceflight tech off Earth is far, far away. Like so far a lot of other technologies are going to scramble the economics anyway.
Of course they are, same with undersea data centers (for different reasons).
But it doesn’t matter. In the late-stage capitalism we find ourselves in, you don’t need a real product, nor a promising prototype. You don’t even need a good idea, you just need the promise that you’ll come up with a good idea soon. That’s enough to get the investors drooling, the shareholders hyped, and the gullible idiots engaged.
And you only have to maintain that long enough to pay yourself and your insiders some fat checks. Then when inevitably, reality barges in and people start to realize it was all bullshit and pipe dreams, you’ve already cashed out. If your PR team is good, the media and your sycophantic fans will praise you as a visionary who was simply, “ahead of their time.” And you can go on to rip off more people.
It’s basically Patreon scams but with billions of dollars.
Interesting. So the “post-truth era” isn’t just for the masses, but the rich as well, as they cannibalise each other.
Late stage capitalism just means late stage fiat currency doesn’t it, since all the money flooding in is debt and QE, and every dollar created and placed into the market is new cheap debt issuance?
Then we bail all the bad debt out when it fails, so the perverse incentive to issue bad debt is always there, because its not capitalist and nobody would backstop this mess if it was their own capital.
Everything you described falls under the umbrella of Capitalism.
Capitalism will always result in this sort of devolution, because it rewards this sort of behavior.
Constant GDP growth fuels capitalist enterprises because valuations go up and Capital is expanded. That incentivizes governments to make access to Capital easier and regulations on growth looser, which the firms themselves favor in terms of lower taxes, cheaper loans, larger capital markets, etc.
How many business leaders lobby, vote, and push for higher general taxes, stronger labor rights, stricter regulations, and more expensive loans?
The only time you’ll see them doing any of those things, is when it directly hurts one of their major competitors.
This makes perfect sense within a Capitalist framework, because private ownership of the means of production and increasing profitability are literally the core of Capitalism. So of course Capitalists will always tend towards what makes the most money.
All the worst traits of modern Capitalism, (Everything is a subscription, planned obsolescence, shrinkflation, extreme litigiousness over patents and copyrights, ads in everything, predatory pricing & monetization) are the logical result of a Capitalist system.
You can have late stage capitalism with any monetary system. Though relying on inherent value tends to leave poor people in much worse conditions much more quickly.
If anything it seems more like crony capitalism, when the CPI is understated and all investments are excluded it drives down borrowing rates and bond yields, which raises stock values and provides a stream of revenue to those with access to the most credit.
People like Elon Musk who avoid paying taxes by borrowing cheap debt, which who would lend to him their own capital when his collateral is Tesla stock and silly ideas like space datacenters. Which is entirely built on speculation and pumps to new all time highs whenever QE is unloaded into the market; they would be taking the risk that Tesla doesnt go to 0 for a small fixed income payout, if it was their own money and a bailout wasnt guaranteed.
They’re a great idea if you happen to own a company making AI, a company making rockets, and a company controlling public opinion.
I envision a future so shitty that people are willing to physically destroy data centers in self-defense. Putting them in space is a really good way to combat that.
Putting them in space also puts them technically outside of the legal jurisdiction of any country. I figure fElon probably assumes that means said servers can never be subpoenaed.
I mean a data center barge or one in Antarctica would do much the same and be wildly cheaper and (relatively) more practical.
But those aren’t as “cool”
Subpoena the ground stations if that was true?
Oh yeah it’s totally a bullshit argument, it wouldn’t hold water in any court. Hell if nothing else, the ground stations like you said, or the country whose airspace the center exists over, would be in jurisdiction.
But I do believe that Musk believes it’s a get out of jail free card.
Agreed. The US can access/subpoena any data it wants from US companies, even if the servers they host the data on are in Europe or Asia or…
It doesn’t matter where the servers and the data is located. It matters who posses (or controls the access) to it.
Little Space James
Keep people from destroying data centers by having them destroy themselves? Is this some sort of zen koan?
Putting data centers in space is a good way to keep people from destroying them. Thermodynamics on the other hand, will have a field day with them.
Have to destroy the rockets that are used to maintain them then and just wait.
They aren’t maintained. They’re a constellation of small satellites in LEO like starlink that just go up and eventually come down.
If they’re too far up latency would be too high
No one is repairing any of these starlink type dishes.
Wasn’t it recently proven that the metals introduced into the upper atmosphere by satellites burning up depletes ozone? Its not a problem yet but maintaining constellations on the scale of cumulative several gigawatts of data centre would leave several tons of satellite burning up every single day. CFC Ozone hole is gonna look like a cloudy day in comparison.
I just wanted to add another note
Even if this ozone thing turns out to not be true, there are still all sorts of other things being burned up in the atmosphere that can have other potential effects. It all needs to be studied given the size of these constellations.
I wouldn’t be surprised if 50-60 years from now, if there is a real issue, that it eventually comes out that SpaceX or other mega constellation companies figured out it would be a problem, and just said nothing. Much like how big oil new CO2 was a problem forever ago and hid it.
I don’t think anything was proven yet, but something came out saying it warranted more studying?
Satellites might need to be redesigned around it in the future and more studies should be done.
Pastry in spaaace! Still, eventually they will stop working.
If they stop working they will just de-orbit it early, or if they can’t cause it’s really broken, they’ll just wait the ~5-10 years to come down on it’s own.
S o l a r. F l a r e
Also the whole being a vacuum thing makes heat dissipation much more difficult.
And an excellent way to scam a little. And fleece the flock
That’s an insightful way of putting it, 10 points.
LOL don’t worry, like all the Space Nutter fantasies from the 1950s onwards, they are wildly impractical and will never, ever happen.
But the dads that never loved them are dying, this is their last chance to try to earn that love by recreating the sci fi fever dreams of the 1950s.
