Comment by alienthrowaway
1 month ago
how much area do you need to radiate away 40 MW, assuming you want to keep your GPUs at a toasty 90 celcius. Every space datacenter fan/promoter enthuses about the free solar power, but forget to mention how the heat will be dissipated.
I don't know why people are so fixated on heating as some kind of gotcha. If we already assumed magical 16km^2 solar array, then we can also assume matching size radiator, with heatpumps. If ISS can do it, then there is no technical issue with doing it on bigger scale. It "only" doesn't make any sense from financial viewpoint, terrestrial datacenters beat it in every way.
NVidia's recent support for warm (45 °C) water cooling for their new racks probably had more impact on price of compute than than space servers will ever have.
Is there not enough space in space?
Space, as in the near absence of material that makes it an almost perfect insulator. Add to it constant compute producing heat and you just cooked your GPUs with no way to dissipate.
That must be why everyone on the ISS has died of heat stroke.
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