lemmydividebyzeroDatacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.
There was one study where they set the price of launching at 0 and it’s still a lot more expensive to use data centers in space.
For anyone who doesn’t know, this is because space is an absolutely terrible place to put computers. Getting power is actually the easiest problem to solve, and is still really hard, because building any kind of infrastructure in space is hard. Then you’ve got all that radiation you have to shield against because you’re no longer protected by the Earth’s atmosphere, and worst of all you’ve got the cooling problem because Jesus fucking Christ, space is not cold!
This is why I get annoyed every time a scifi movie shows people freezing to death in space. Because it leads to this level of mass delusion and then suddenly it matters and everyone just unquestioningly believes the lie that space is cold. Space is a vacuum. A vacuum is what your Contigo travel mug uses to keep your coffee scalding hot after four hours. If vacuums are that good at keeping something hot when it naturally wants to get colder, think about what they’ll do to something that is actively generating heat. All of your components are going to cook.
There are proposals to put data centres at the bottom of the ocean that are substantially more credible than this idiocy.
Tell me if I’m wrong, but with the shielding they have on the ISS doesn’t it have issues that consumer grade computers they use last a few months due to various radiation and heat that they die? So an AI data center is going to be insane to protect long enough to make its components useful.