Why is anyone reporting on what the world's luckiest ket head thinks? Who cares? His brain is full of holes. He did nazi salutes and is a right-wing extremist. At least most ket heads just stop showering, get really into camping at festivals, and listen to shit music. This one talks too much.
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2025
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Server farms, especially ones with tons of GPUs, see little benefit from being in LEO. They cannot radiate heat efficiently, especially this amount of heat. Plus, unless boosted every now and then, they'll eventually burn up.
How do you fix a hardware issue up there?
None of it adds up on the balance sheet. It makes zero sense to do this in space. The only benefit is hyping up the AI market because space. That benefit won't last very long in our newscycle.
I did the math for it, and you'd need a radiator at least a kilometer wide for a 'typical' datacenter setup, according to the equation here: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/heatrad.php
A = P / (ε * σ * T^4), where
P = the power of waste heat the radiator can get rid of (watts)
σ = 5.670373×10-8 = Stefan-Boltzmann constant (W m-2K-4)
ε = emissivity of radiator (theoretical maximum is 1.0 for a perfect black body, real world radiator will be less. Should be at least 0.8 or above to be worth-while)
A = area of radiator (m2)
T = temperature of radiator, this assumes temperature of space is zero degrees (degrees K)
x^4 = raise x to the fourth power, i.e, x * x * x * x
Probably bigger if you don't want the coolant to be boiling hot.
...Do you know how expensive that would be?
I'll give you a hint: orders of magnitude more expensive than geothermal loops for Earth-based datacenters. And even those are apparently too expensive for them to construct.
Musk is completely delusional, and he's surrounded by yes men telling him want he wants to hear.
I heard he likes to drink pee
Not only are the disadvantages many, but what the fuck even is the advantage?
The fantasy seems to be the higher solar radiation flux, so the solar array can be smaller.
...And real estate costs/legal issues, I guess?
That's technically true, but silly. It's like saying "hey, we'd need less cooling area if we built the server farm at the bottom of the ocean!" But even that's not a great analogy; it'd literally be easier to build and maintain at the bottom of the ocean than geosync orbit.
Pretty sure the largest structures on the ISS is a toss-up between the thermal radiators and the solar panels.
So massive expense to generate power and massive expense to dissipate the waste heat. You know, that waste heat that is already causing water issues near data centers on earth in an environment that we have had centuries of experience working in.
Elon is tripping balls again
The solar panels also contribute a large amount of drag in thin remaining atmosphere at that altitude, requiring periodic reboosts, which requires fuel deliveries. The drag is substantial enough that the ISS rotates its solar panels to be flat during the night half of orbit to minimize it.
Elon Musk says....
He says a lot of shit, the world would be a better place if everyone would have ignored this idiot since he was born. Don't repost his bullshit, don't promote him, ignore him and hope he goes away soon.
Professor! Lava! Hot!
Ok? How does Elon, the man with the biggest brain cells, expect to cool these space data centers?
Hmm yeah, where would someone dissipate heat in space...
Are you suggesting that it's easy to do this?
"Easy" is not the word I would use. But it's fairly simple. Space is ~-250*F. Run a closed liquid cooling loop into the walls of the craft or something.
That's not how space works though. It's a vacuum. It doesn't work the same way as on earth. What temperature do you think the side pointing to sun is? And what temperature do you think the side that is away from the sun is? Heat is just not going to magically transfer into space.
There's nothing magical about heat transfer.
Yes there is. You need to be able to transfer heat to something else. It doesn't just magically disappear. Space is a vacuum. I think you watch too many movies. You probably think that people will just instantly freeze in space without gear on.
I'll give you an example. Do you have one of those water bottles that can keep your drink cold for like a day? The space in between is a vacuum. Why do you think that the liquid inside can say so cold for so long? It's the same principle. Imagine a data center floating around in this space, there is nowhere for the heat to go.
The reason why earth is warm is because the sun radiates and heats up the ground on earth. This is also why it's colder the higher you go within the first few layers of our atmosphere and hotter near the ground.
Basically, you have to radiate heat away from the data center in this case or transfer heat to one area or the other. It's not as simple as being like, hey space, take my heat will you? There is nothing to transfer it to.
Yes there is.
Oh okay. In that case , it's cooled with magic. 🪄
Musk vs Huang, hmmm tough choice lmao, Jensen was probably trying to be polite and not just say that's dumb as shit
Musk just wants to hype up this idea so maybe companies will pay SpaceX to try to do this, it's marketing for his own company
They are both corrupt American oligarchs.
Don't get me wrong, there are oligarchs everywhere, but American ones in particular have their own nuances so to speak.
I figure Jensen is much smarter than Elon
I think they are both very smart and shrewd individuals. That doesn't mean they are not subject to common human weaknesses like narcsissism, blinding opulence, arrogance and less common ones such as regressiveness and lack of humanity.
Fascinating how lack of humanity can be a common human weakness
Out say by the standards of our time, it's less common than the other weakness I mentioned.
"Elon Musk says...". Me: Please don't.