How much mass do we need to put in orbit to radiate 10 GW of data center heat? How much rocket fuel does it take to lift the rocket fuel required to lift that mass? Which part of this is cheaper or more effective than building data centers 100 feet below the ice in Antarctica ? Other than serving workloads that are already in orbit, I don't see the point. How much addressable market do we have for AI compute that is already in orbit?
The appeal is solar power efficiency gains. And yes it is a notable amount of extra mass, but not a deal-breaking amount. Latency is pretty minimal regardless of location (sub-100ms) which is not nothing but it's minor for things like serving AI inference.
Not saying I think it's the best idea, but it is theoretically feasible.
When you say it is not deal-breaking - have you looked at any math? Real world data finds we need about 6kg of radiator surface to radiate 1kW. [0] . A 100MW datacenter would need about 600,000 KG just of radiator mass. ISS was only 450,000KG and it took 13 years to assemble. Meanwhile, we're projected to launch 600X that data center capacity on earth in just the next three years.
To say that this is pure folly is an understatement. It is not folly, and it is not foolishness. It is fraud.
