To remove heat by radiation there's a big benefit to running the GPUs hotter as the radiation will be proportional to the fourth power of temperature. This resource is using 85 deg C versus 60 deg C for OP which will improve cooling performance.

If Nvidia/SpaceX can make the chips run at a higher temperature that would help a lot although I assume it would have already been done if it were possible. Another option is to add a heat pump to raise radiator temperature if the smaller radiator mass can pay for the heat pump mass.

But, datacenter development in space does not deal with local NIMBYs, just centralized decision-makers that are easier to "influence".

They'll pay the price if it means their data centers are immune to the anger of the commoners who are being surveilled, analyzed, and manipulated by systems running on these data centers.

You are altogether externalizing the cost of carbon dioxide emissions that humanity has to pay for. The resulting global warming is not a joke. The heat problem cumulatively is bigger on Earth than it would be in space.

It's still full of delicious rocks with completely insane market value. They sit there waiting for our greed and capabilities to reach escape velocity. Some day there will be a TEMU space station drop shipping custom fidget spinners to wherever we desire them. Probably not any time soon but eventually...

It assumes $44/kg to launch into orbit. Idk where that came from if it's a musk claim or what but it's ludicrous against current costs. Currently still at thousands/kg and dropping but nowhere near $44 and I haven't heard anyone claim that's likely who isn't selling a rocket company.

>So a $4b data center on Earth delivers the same value as a $40b data center in Space?

It may do so, initially, compared to a new-build DC.

But, critically, you can upgrade the racks in an already-built DC without demolishing the entire building. You can't do that in orbit, so the full lifecycle ROI is lower.

Orbital DCs are constrained by cooling and by bandwidth. Even a space-to-ground laser (which does not currently exist in a sufficiently-mature form) has a fraction of the bandwidth of a proper terrestrial fiber line. So you're paying at least 10x for essentially a disposable datacenter that can't move as much data in or out, and likely will not be as powerful as a terrestrial DC because of the cooling constraint, just to have it in space because reasons.

I don't see the business case, at all.

This is so transparently another hyperloop-esque pipe dream invented for the sole purpose of inflating SpaceX's valuation.

There are non-polluting ways of launching. SpinLaunch

When I was peripherally working on some HPC stuff, there was a comment by one of the hardware guys that it mattered which national lab you were building the supercomputer for, because the guys at high altitude like Los Alamos get a lot more bitflips than someone closer to sea-level like Argonne. Although that said, for an exascale supercomputer, the mean time between uncorrected bit flip somewhere in the machine is on the order of a few hours, which means that large supercomputer-scale workloads should actually expect to hit a bit flip in their computation.

Cosmic rays can probably be resolved with some parity bits and redundancy. Especially since these don't have to be located way up in geosynch, lower orbits get you more magnetosphere protection.

Not that it isn't a problem, but I think heat dissipation will have the edge.

I mean, LLMs are already a pile of stochastic output .. maybe that just adds to the fun? /s

Silly human, won't be us building that. Just hope that you get one of the nice gilded cages!

A startup I worked at is building wave-powered data centers [1].

1: https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/catalyst-building-inferen...

It's like the idea of Mars as a backup to human civilization. The technology required to make Mars livable and independent from Earth is so advanced it would allow you to survive basically anything here on Earth already.

I saw this a couple of days ago, you might be interested: 'World’s first wind-powered underwater datacentre starts operating in China' [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/09/worlds-first-w...

I would suggest data centres near the arctic - it's close to most of the Northern hemisphere's users, presents an easy option for cooling (the place is a heat sink), and, with collapsing glaciers, there will be abundant hydro power to be used.

It has the killer feature of allowing a human to walk up to a rack and replace a component.

I know Microsoft tried it. They had a press release saying it was successful but never did it again. Does anyone know more about that? I agree with you that data centers in the ocean seem a better bet.

What’s the regulatory path to something like this? Oceans seem to have all the problems of land except manifold: permitting is nigh impossible, and power is hard to line up.

To make it worse, underwater tech is notoriously hard to make operationally visible. Sabotage is trivial and undifferentiable from failure and honest error. When we used to work in trading subsea cable cuts in Asia would constantly ruin our best networks. Everyone had point to point microwave expressly because it wasn’t breakable in this way. Exposing compute to this rather than just networking would have doomed the entire enterprise.

He must have that cave submarine lying around somewhere.

Corrosion is one hell of a problem in salt water.

I think the specific attraction to space is the copious massive amounts of free solar energy, isn't it?

(In reality, they want to build the torment nexus at the Lagrange points because that would just be edgy-as-fuck)

I think it's less Skynet and more Wintermute: Some people saw the movie Elysium or read a summary of the book Neuromancer, and decided those were aspirational visions of how to be Untouchably Rich In Space.

Though there is a simpler explanation: Some guy with lots of stock in Rocket Launches and Datacenters has an extreme financial incentive to push stories where spending on both things simultaneously is the big new thing.

there has been a lot of pushback about building new data centers basically anywhere on earth might as well build them in space.

Because that's the next generation's problem, and we can do more to mortgage their future for our own luxury :)

You can't just sea-stead your way to it though, salt water + network accessibility + literal piracy + how much data you can move + the environmental toll of doing much of anything on the see = equally crazy challenges with more laws that can stop you.

By the time you got permission to lay all the cables you'd need to lay, etc. your competition would already be done with their space data center, or Lunar one in a peak of eternal sunshine or whatever. This is a race to the most compute. Whoever gets the most geniuses in their "country of geniuses in a datacenter" wins.

Wins what? Well, everything they want effectively forever.

Space gets you 24/7 solar power. To run a data center for 12 hours without sunlight, you'd need massive batteries. Also oceans have weather and corrosion.

The issue with putting stuff in space isn't the kinetic energy required. In LEO that's about 30 megajoules per kilogram or $5 worth of propellant. The issue is that orbital launch vehicles are not reusable, so you must destroy an expensive rocket to get your payload to orbit. All of these space datacenter efforts are betting that Starship will be fully reusable.

And in the next paragraph:

"However, there are niche applications where the much higher costs of computing in space could be justified. Examples include ... active collision avoidance in the increasingly crowded low Earth orbit."

A self-justifying purpose!

Just so that nobody jumps in with what I first wanted to jump in with, this estimate was done with the assumption that Elon Musk's Starship is built, works as advertised, and launch costs are at the lower end of the projected range.

It wasn't an order of magnitude more because of how expensive rocket launches currently are.

(I'm glad that I read the article before arguing this one...)