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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

A blog post covers why datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea [taranis.ie]. Thermal management is just the beginning of the long list of challenges which make space an inferior environment for data centers.

In the interests of clarity, I am a former NASA engineer/scientist with a PhD in space electronics. I also worked at Google for 10 years, in various parts of the company including YouTube and the bit of Cloud responsible for deploying AI capacity, so I'm quite well placed to have an opinion here.

The short version: this is an absolutely terrible idea, and really makes zero sense whatsoever. There are multiple reasons for this, but they all amount to saying that the kind of electronics needed to make a datacenter work, particularly a datacenter deploying AI capacity in the form of GPUs and TPUs, is exactly the opposite of what works in space. If you've not worked specifically in this area before, I'll caution against making gut assumptions, because the reality of making space hardware actually function in space is not necessarily intuitively obvious.

Previously:
(2025) The Data Center Resistance Has Arrived [soylentnews.org]
(2025) Microsoft: the Company Doesn't Have Enough Electricity to Install All the AI GPUs in its Inventory [soylentnews.org]
(2025) China Submerges a Data Center in the Ocean to Conserve Water, is That Even a Good Idea? [soylentnews.org]
(2025) Data Centers Turn to Commercial Aircraft Jet Engines Bolted Onto Trailers as AI Power Crunch Bites [soylentnews.org]
(2025) The Real (Economic) AI Apocalypse is Nigh [soylentnews.org]
(2025) Real Datacenter Emissions Are A Dirty Secret [soylentnews.org]
... and more.

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