this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2026
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This is incorrect. You cannot do convection heat removal in a vacuum because there's no air. However, you can still do radiant heat dispersal.
So you dump your heat into something that has a lot of surface area with which to radiate it away from your components.
Space is either very hot or very cold, depending on whether you are in light or shadow. If one side is constantly exposed to light, then there must be radiators on the other side to radiate that heat back off into the cold.
Exactly. Look at pictures of the ISS: it has radiators. It has to get rid of its heat, and it works. And those radiators aren't even as big as the solar panels. The radiators really aren't the problem.
The problem is scale. The ISS has about enough power for a single server rack. If you want entire datacenters in space, you're going to need thousands of times the scale of the ISS.
And radiateing heat is the worst way to remove it.
It's the only way to do it though, so you have no other choice.
Now calculate the size of the radiators a full scale data centre would need.
About 2000 sqm per MW, according to Google. Given an average data center load of 100 MW, about 200k sqm. Add that again for the solar panels you'd need, and you're at a cool half a million sqm. Compare the ISS, at a measly 7000 sqm. The mind (and budget) boggles.