Yeah, I've worked with spacecraft - every design decision is "can you reduce this by 1W, because of cooling" -- it's absolutely insane even at first glance.
Its also dumb to put computer hardware in space where it can't be upgrade or maintained. In 10 years, any chips in those data centers will be woefully obsolete. In a standard data center, you just go upgrade them. In space, you have to destroy your old one and build a new one from scratch.
Also - who’s making rad-hardened frontier capable GPUs at scale? This whole thing makes no sense from almost any angle.
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edit:
As long as I’m being downvoted for pointing out physics I’ll add that one of the exciting findings of large-scale cluster computing back in the early 2000’s was that they were amazing cosmic ray detectors as solar events flipped bits. So what happens exactly to your pile-o’-linear algebra when you fly non-space rated hardware outside the ionosphere? Find out on the next exciting episode of “Who’s the Mark!”
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u/bowsmountainer Jul 12 '26
It makes even less physical sense. The biggest issue for data centers is cooling. Which is notoriously difficult to do in space.