250
Data centers raise nearby temperatures by up to 4 degrees in Phoenix
(techxplore.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
250 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
84769 readers
4011 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
Yeah, this is fundamental; if you use a thousand joules of energy to do work (of any kind) you will ultimately end up producing a thousand joules of waste heat. The only choice one has in the matter is where that heat goes.
This is a major reason why I get annoyed at the people pooh-poohing space-based data centers. It literally puts the waste heat outside the environment. It should be everything that data center opponents say they want.
Space-based data centers are wildly impractical to bordering on not physically possible. The largest feature on the ISS, which you can resolve from earth with a pair of binoculars, is the radiators, and it generates 70 kW. Large data centers use >100MW of electricity. You'd be looking at large fractions of a square mile of just radiators.
The radiator panels on the ISS are 2,500 square meters in area. The radiator panels are 645 square meters.
Most of the proposals for space-based data centers have ended up focusing on plans to place thousands of individual satellites into orbit, not just one big space station with everything packed inside it. Scott Manley recently did an analysis of the cooling requirements, he worked through all the numbers and explained how it works, and there really doesn't seem to be a problem here.
I read an article a month or two ago that explained without an atmosphere to carry away the heat, the chips would just super-heat and melt.
That article was incorrect, then. There are many satellites already in orbit that have computers in them - basically all of them do, nowadays - and cooling them is a well understood engineering problem.
The satellite computers don't perform as much work, produce as much heat, or are as densely placed as those in the data centers.
How was it incorrect? How can you transfer heat away from the electronics into another medium when there is no other medium because it's in space?
Same way radiation heat works from the sun.