I am *really* skeptical of Bezos’ claim that data centers in space can essentially mooch off free solar power and operate at lower cost than on earth.
Ignoring the cost of sending up tons of server infrastructure, and how they would be prohibitively expensive to maintain and upgrade, and how one might have to deorbit them, I think the main problem of trying to extract massive amounts of work from solar power is COOLING.
Unlike on earth, which has a plentiful supply of cool water that removes the heat of your GPUs through conduction and which you can dump into the environment, heat dissipation in space is primarily done through infrared radiation, which is *very* inefficient in comparison.
Wikipedia says that IR radiation panels in space can be expected to dissipate up to 350 W per square meter. A gigawatt plant would need 2.8 *million* square meters of radiating surface.
lol.
“Data centres in space? Jeff Bezos says it's possible”