zlacker

>>jonbae+(OP)
Last time these folks were mentioned on HN, there was a lot of skepticism that this is really possible to do. The issue is cooling: in space, you can't rely on convection or conduction to do passive cooling, so you can only radiate away heat. However, the radiator would need to be several kilometers big to provide enough cooling, and obviously launching such a large object into space would therefore eat up any cost savings from the "free" solar power.

More discussion: >>43977188

>>Reuben+o1
Their website pitches it as 16 square km

>>petese+63
Makes me wonder about building a 16km square datacenter on earth. I wonder if building in that way, with a lower "data density" would allow for more passive cooling and you'd have the large solar field.

Wonder if that would be less impactful than how ever many rockets they'll need to send up, plus you could, ya know, ~drive~ bike to a failed machine.

>>GCUMst+54
It says "Starcloud plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with super-large solar and cooling panels approximately 4 kilometers in width and length."

So, it's the solar/cooling panels that make up that space, not the data centre per se.

>>stevag+Z4
I know. I'm saying what if you build lower density data centers that could be more passively cooled. Apparently being in space is no issue for latency, so I can't see why building it on earth in a remote-ish area would matter.