[foobarian]

The atmosphere is in the way even at night, and re-radiates the energy. The effective background temperature is the temperature of the air, not to mention it would only work at night. I think there would need to be like 50-ish acres of radiators for a 50MW datacenter to radiate from 60 to 30C. This would be a lot smaller in space due to bigger temp delta. Either way opex would be much much less than average Earth DC (PUE almost 1 instead of run-of-the mill 1.5 or as low as 1.1 for hyperscalers). But yeah the upfront cost would be immense.

[tstrimple]

I think you’re ignoring a huge factor in how radiative cooling actually works. I thought the initial question was fine if you hadn’t read the article but understand the downvotes due to doubling down. Think of it this way. Why do thermoses have a vacuum sealed chamber between two walls in order to insulate the contents of the bottle? Because a vacuum is a fucking terrible heat convector. Putting your data center into space in order to cool it is like putting a computer inside of a thermos to cool it. It makes zero fucking sense. There is nowhere for the heat to actually radiate to so it stays inside.

[foobarian]

Pardon but this doesn't make sense to me. A 1 m^2 radiator in space can eliminate almost a kilowatt of heat.

>vacuum is a fucking terrible heat convector

Yes we're talking about radiating not convection

[wat10000]

At what temperature?

And a kilowatt from one square meter is awful. You can do far more than that with access to an atmosphere, never mind water.

[kergonath]

> A 1 m^2 radiator in space can eliminate almost a kilowatt of heat.

Assuming that this is the right order of magnitude, a 8MW datacenter discussed upthread would require ~8000 m^2, plus a fancy way of getting the heat there.

A kilowatt is nothing. The workstation on my desk can sustain 1 kW.

[mercutio2]

Why are you assuming active heat transfer? Passive is the way to go.