Orbital data centers are impractical for a lot of reasons (to put it mildly) but radiation shielding isn’t one of them. Proportionally less shielding is needed as one scales up, due to lower surface/volume ratios.
There are ways in which shielding in space can do harm: really energetic particles get trapped and produce a shower of daughter particles and rays over a greater area. So you'd need even more shielding. Or you accept that such things will happen and use rad-hard parts, redundancy etc. When you have the whole atmosphere above, it's much less of a concern.
Besides, that's even more mass to be lofted. Pushing the economics further into the ludicrous end.
Orbital data centers are impractical for a lot of reasons (to put it mildly) but radiation shielding isn’t one of them. Proportionally less shielding is needed as one scales up, due to lower surface/volume ratios.
There are ways in which shielding in space can do harm: really energetic particles get trapped and produce a shower of daughter particles and rays over a greater area. So you'd need even more shielding. Or you accept that such things will happen and use rad-hard parts, redundancy etc. When you have the whole atmosphere above, it's much less of a concern.
Besides, that's even more mass to be lofted. Pushing the economics further into the ludicrous end.
Sure. At the cost of lofting that shielding from the ground and taking the economics from 500x to 2000x crazy.