this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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Two main problems with data centers. Power and cooling. In space the power is doable. The cooling is a major pain in the ass and always has been. There are only three ways to get rid of heat. Conduction, convection, and radiation. The first two don’t work because of the vacuum thing. The third is horribly inefficient. Just look at the ISS and the giant fins that only dumps about 70 kW of waste heat through radiator “wings” that weigh several tons. A single rack in a high density compute rack can generate 100kW by itself.
So yeah given the expensive and how inefficient it is, it’s a terrible idea.
Edit: I’m a system architect so dealing with data center heat is something I’m familiar with.
The radiators would be about the same size as the solar panels. Both would have to be huge to run a rack full of GPUs.
Radiators work because they have something to radiate heat into. Space is famously empty, so a radiator the size of a planet would only work as a heat sink until the total heat in the system was high enough to make everything glow like a heating element, at which point you dump waste energy as visible light.
You can radiate heat into the vacuum of space, it’s just extremely slow compared to doing it into atmosphere. Vacuum is not a perfect insulator in this regard.
Think of it this way, if a vacuum was a perfect insulator, how would the sun radiate heat to Earth?
Your car radiator is actually using convection to convect heat into the air.
The spacecraft radiators use radiation to dump heat by emitting infrared photons. Photons do not require a medium. This type of radiator works by maximizing the area of hot surface exposed to empty space (which has an effective temperature of 3 K). They have to be pointed into a dark area and away from the sun. There's no advantage to fins, because you want to maximize area perpendicular to the dark sky.
Both devices are called radiators, but they are different kinds of devices.
The radiators dissipate the heat as infrared radiation. They work as long as they are pointed away from the sun or earth.
If they couldn't get rid of the heat, there would be no satellites or space stations.