[Scott Manley] Does It Make Sense To Put Data Centers In Space? Can They Really Cost Less To Operate?

In short no. Longer answer? Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Seriously, parts fail. It's going to cost more to get a HDD into space than it will cost to buy the thing in the first place. Even if you design the system so that it doesn't require maintenance, you're going to get parts failing regularly. If you're not going to have an astronaut living up there and doing repairs, you're eventually just going to keep losing capacity. I suppose that you could design it so that eventually when 30% of a module/rack has failed you just give up, eject it, and let it burn up in the atmosphere. But, then you're going to require regular deliveries of new racks to the datacenter just to keep things at the initial capacity.

Then there are the power requirements. Yes, you get "free power" from the sun, but a 1 rack server might need 5000 W, for which you'd need about 20 square metres of solar panel. And, that's per rack, and assuming you never go into shade (like behind the planet). If you want to be close enough to easily transmit data back and forth, you're probably going to be going into the planet's shadow pretty often, so you'll need maybe double that. And, of course, the bigger the solar array, the more it's going to be heated up by the sun, so the more heat you're going to need to dump.

And, cooling is the killer. On earth, cooling a datacenter is a major issue. The old systems used air conditioners which required lots of power. The newer systems use evaporative cooling. None of those work in space. The only thing that would work is to radiate the heat. But, radiating heat is hard. You'd need a big structure, and you'd need to ensure it's never exposed to the sun, or it will heat up instead of cooling off.

Then there's getting the data in and out. Let's assume the DC is mostly doing compute tasks, not IO tasks. It's training AI models, not hosting videos. Even then, you'll need to send data up and get it back down. On earth you can lay fat fiber optic pipes to your DC, bury them underground, and never have to worry about it. A DC in space would need to communicate via radio or lasers, and that would require either multiple ground stations or short bursts whenever the DC happened to be overhead. And, whatever solution you came up with would only get a fraction of the data you could send via fiber optic lines.

Really, the only real advantage of a DC in space is the free power. But, install a bunch of solar panels next to your DC on the ground and you've got essentially the same thing now. The difference is that you can rely on traditional, reliable, cheap cooling methods, you can send in a tech to replace a dead hard drive, and bandwidth is much simpler.