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iancmceachern 7 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"

tomasphan 7 hours ago | parent [-]

It would take roughly 5000 square meter area to cool a typical small data center heat output (1 MW). Not great, not terrible.

kibibu 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

iancmceachern 4 hours ago | parent [-]

That's a lot of weight to launch into orbit

iancmceachern 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah but these hyperscalers are building data centers that are 100 or even 1000 mW

UltraSane 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That is a very tiny amount of compute though.