Comment by trhway

4 hours ago

>Getting rid of the copious amounts of heat that data centers generate might also be a challenge

at 70 Celsius - normal for GPU - 1.5m2 radiates something like 1KWt (which requires 4m2 of panels to collect), so doesn't look to a be an issue. (some look to ISS which is a bad example - the ISS needs 20 Celsius, and black body radiation is T^4)

So for the ISS at 20c you'd get 481 W/m^2 so you'd only need 2.3m2. So comparing the ISS at 20c to space datacenters at 70c you get an improvement of 63%. Nice, but doesn't feel game-changing.

The power radiated is T^4, but 70c is only about 17.1% warmer than 20c because you need to compare in kelvin.