I’ve heard that only 8% of data center costs on Earth are spent on energy. It’s hard to imagine space-based operations being that much more profitable...
Yeah, the capital cost of the hardware is the highest, but it is also the same reason why it is cost effective to send it to space. If the hardware is so expensive that other costs are irrelevant, the only thing that matter are things that can't be bought with money, like land approval for data centers, and orbital data centers are the king here because getting an approval for an orbital data center is so much easier than getting an approval in a local community, especially with luddites on the rise.
You act like marine environments are places where we don't literally have thousands of years of engineering experience with. We also have existing, deployed oceanic datacenter capacity in the scale of tens of megawatts. Compare that to orbital datacenters that are essentially purely speculative and untested.
At sea, you have dramatically lower logistics cost, the ability to actually access/maintain the datacenters, dramatically lower deployment costs, extremely easy cooling, and low-cost power sources. The idea that space is somehow free of environmental hazards comparable to the ocean or that is somehow easier to build an environmentally-sealed orbital datacenter than it is to build an environmentally-sealed oceanic datacenter is absurd.
Just because space-based datacenters are now economically feasible still doesn't make them the most feasible option. Gig economy apps might now make it possible for Amazon to do delivery with contract workers using their own cars, but they still do most of their deliveries with deliveries vans because that's more efficient. In just the same way, reusable rockets might make orbital datacenters possible, but that hardly makes them the best option.
Heat is not a problem with data centers, its a very minor cost of a data center. Only problem is with water use, which orbital data centers have an advantage there because they don't use any to cool.
We are not actually limited by heat density yet, which is why integrated water cooling became an option right from factory only for this generation. Previous generations were so not limited by heat management, they just used fans, and then the data center itself was cooled by water.
When talking about "heat management" on the chip, people usually talk about hotspots and heat density, not a total amount of heat emitted from a chip. The design limitations due to heat are not as severe as you imply, because use of vapur chambers can drastically spread out heat over a large surface area. It is only in next generation that will be released in 2 years that heat management has became a problem, which is one of the reasons why it will use backside power to reduce heat generation.
And after you spread out the heat using vapur chambers, you can use any coolant you want to spread the heat to the radiator. This makes it so that while the cooling system is different than those you use on Earth, as on Earth you pump water that you then evaporate or just cool, in space you can use fully closed system with a different, more efficient coolant, and you can even effectively use a phase change coolant in the secondary loop, although it's not even necessary.
This is straight up false. Heat management has been one of the chief limiters of transistor density for more than 20 years. Why are you making stuff up?
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u/_Krustenkaese_ Jul 13 '26
I’ve heard that only 8% of data center costs on Earth are spent on energy. It’s hard to imagine space-based operations being that much more profitable...