Comment by iancmceachern
10 hours ago
Yes. It is very cold up there but there is also no matter, or very little matter. So head conduction and convection don't work, it's all radiation. When we are learning to solve heat transfer problems in engineering school we are generally taught to neglect radiation, because it's effect on cooling the system is typically second or third order when compared to the to "big C's"
It would take roughly 5000 square meter area to cool a typical small data center heat output (1 MW). Not great, not terrible.
Apparently, OpenAI plan to build 250 GW of computing capacity by 2033.
To put that in space, based on your numbers, that's 1,250 square kilometers of cooling - an area roughly equivalent in size to Los Angeles
That's a lot of weight to launch into orbit
That is a very tiny amount of compute though.
Yeah but these hyperscalers are building data centers that are 100 or even 1000 mW