But the cooling cost wouldn’t be smaller. There’s no good way to eliminate the waste heat into space. It’s actually far far harder to radiate the waste heat into space directly than it would be to get rid of it on Earth.

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buildbot 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Which is why vacuum flask for hot/cold drinks are a thing/work. Empty space is a pretty good insulator as it turns out.

It’s a little worrying so many don’t know that.

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foobarian 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't know about that. Look at where the power goes in a typical data center, for a 10MW DC you might spend 2MW just to blow air around. A radiating cooler in space would almost eliminate that. The problem is the initial investment is probably impractical.

	▲	nick238 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>99.999% of the power put into compute turns into heat, so you're going to need to reject 8 MW of power into space with pure radiation. The ISS EATCS radiators reject 0.07 MW of power in 85 sq. m, so you're talking about 9700 sq. m of radiators, or bigger than a football field/pitch.
	▲	Hikikomori 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Now scale the radiator size for your 8MW datacenter.