Comment by pointlessone
17 hours ago
DGX H200 is 10,2 kW. So that like 10 of them. Or only 80 H200. Doesn’t sound like a big data center. More like a server room.
ISS radiators are huge 13.6x3.1 m. Each radiates 35 kW. So you need 3 of them to have your 100 kW target. They are also filled with gas that needs pumping so not exactly a passive system and as such can break down for a whole lot of reasons.
You also need to collect that power so you need about the same amount of power coming from solar panels. ISS solar array wings are 35x12 m and can generate about 31 kW of power. So we’ll need at least 3 of them. BTW each weighs a ton, a literal metric ton.
It hardly seems feasible. Huge infrastructure costs for small AI server rooms in space.
if I may add, you can't really launch a station three times the size of ISS with a single rocket so there will be multiple launches. Just the launch costs alone could likely finance multiple similarly sized server rooms on land.
It should be smaller than ISS. IIRC, ISS has three solar arrays and two radiators. DGX is about the size of a fridge. Let’s add two more fridges worth of infra for solar and radiator. Maybe another fridge for comms. But these three fridges replace all the modules of ISS. It’s still gonna be about 6 (maybe up to 10?) tons of mass to lift. But Starship can do 100-150 tons to LEO so might be doable.