"you just need radiators which are passive

"Just" is doing a lot of work there. SpaceX is planning to launch 100 GW of compute annually, that comes with ~ 2.5 square kilometers of radiator (assuming an optimistic 800K radiator temp and emissivity of 0.9, double sided)

Go for advanced carbon composites, you can do that with just 5,000 metrics tons or so of material. That's 34 starship launches just for the radiators. We haven't solved assembly, we haven't brought up power panels or core compute. Planned launch cadence that SpaceX hopes to reach end of this year: 12/year.

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spongebobstoes an hour ago | parent [-]

radiators about the same size and weight as solar panels will do the trick

there is already a h100 in orbit

1GW of compute is a lot in 2026. comparing 100GW of annual compute to SpaceX 2026 goals does not make sense

if Starship launch cost predictions are accurate, data centers in space will happen within 10 years

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croes 36 minutes ago | parent [-]

> The numbers are brutal. Starcloud’s own white paper estimates that a two-sided radiator held around 20°C would emit only about 633 watts per square meter, over 1,000 times slower than water cooling of AI chips on Earth. So, a puny 1-megawatt orbital data centre, 1,000 times smaller than the gigawatt scale of hyperscale data centres on Earth, would need about 1,600 square meters of radiator, an area roughly the size of a hockey rink.

1GW needs a pretty big area for radiation.

And in space your data centers is hard to defend against foreign actors

	▲	spongebobstoes a few seconds ago \| parent [-]
		chips run way hotter than 20C, and radiative cooling scales to the fourth power of temperature. check the math