Space computers stay cool by radiating heat into the void
By 2030, digital processing could consume a fifth of the world's electricity, forcing engineers to look toward the freezing vacuum of the cosmos for a solution.
On Earth, data centers are essentially massive furnaces that require billions of gallons of water and giant fans to keep from melting down. In the vacuum of space, however, the rules of thermodynamics change completely. Because there is no air to trap heat, an orbital computer can shed its warmth by beaming it away as infrared radiation. This process works most efficiently on the dark side of a satellite, where temperatures plunge to nearly 270 degrees below zero. By positioning a network of a million solar-powered satellites in low Earth orbit, companies like SpaceX aim to move the heaviest AI processing tasks off the planet entirely.
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