this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
99 points (93.0% liked)
Technology
84796 readers
3607 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
of course you can, by thermal radiation. Power by solar panels which can generate a lot without atmosphere filtering sun energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_thermal_control
The ISS has a lot of big solar panels. The other big panels they have are thermal radiators.
They have to have quite large thermal radiators because it's very inefficient. The ISS has people and a very small amount of computing power.
Data centers generate several orders of magnitude more heat. You would need several orders of magnitude more thermal radiators than you would solar panels. The bigger you make the data center, which is important for density since you're introducing a lot of lag due to the speed of light, the less room you have to put thermal radiators or solar panels.
Then you need to work out how to get spare servers, and/or server parts up and down from the Data Center. All of these things are consumables, and all of them have significantly more wear and tear outside of the Earth's atmosphere.
It is possible. It is not efficient or sensible. It sounds cool, it doesn't require buying land, and there aren't currently international agreements about doing dumb stuff in space in the same way there are for doing dumb stuff in the ocean.
More so these are not giant data centers they are just satellites acting as a data center. So perhaps larger than a typical communication satellite but nothing like a giant warehouse that we would have on the ground.