Comment by foobarian
2 months ago
The atmosphere is in the way even at night, and re-radiates the energy. The effective background temperature is the temperature of the air, not to mention it would only work at night. I think there would need to be like 50-ish acres of radiators for a 50MW datacenter to radiate from 60 to 30C. This would be a lot smaller in space due to bigger temp delta. Either way opex would be much much less than average Earth DC (PUE almost 1 instead of run-of-the mill 1.5 or as low as 1.1 for hyperscalers). But yeah the upfront cost would be immense.
I think you’re ignoring a huge factor in how radiative cooling actually works. I thought the initial question was fine if you hadn’t read the article but understand the downvotes due to doubling down. Think of it this way. Why do thermoses have a vacuum sealed chamber between two walls in order to insulate the contents of the bottle? Because a vacuum is a fucking terrible heat convector. Putting your data center into space in order to cool it is like putting a computer inside of a thermos to cool it. It makes zero fucking sense. There is nowhere for the heat to actually radiate to so it stays inside.
Pardon but this doesn't make sense to me. A 1 m^2 radiator in space can eliminate almost a kilowatt of heat.
>vacuum is a fucking terrible heat convector
Yes we're talking about radiating not convection
At what temperature?
And a kilowatt from one square meter is awful. You can do far more than that with access to an atmosphere, never mind water.
> A 1 m^2 radiator in space can eliminate almost a kilowatt of heat.
Assuming that this is the right order of magnitude, a 8MW datacenter discussed upthread would require ~8000 m^2, plus a fancy way of getting the heat there.
A kilowatt is nothing. The workstation on my desk can sustain 1 kW.
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