Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.

The short version: this is an absolutely terrible idea, and really makes zero sense whatsoever. There are multiple reasons for this, but they all amount to saying that the kind of electronics needed to make a datacenter work, particularly a datacenter deploying AI capacity in the form of GPUs and TPUs, is exactly the opposite of what works in space. If you've not worked specifically in this area before, I'll caution against making gut assumptions, because the reality of making space hardware actually function in space is not necessarily intuitively obvious.

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The first reason for doing this that seems to come up is abundant access to power in space. This really isn't the case. You basically have two options: solar and nuclear. Solar means deploying a solar array with photovoltaic cells – something essentially equivalent to what I have on the roof of my house here in Ireland, just in space.

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The first question is where in space?

If you are in low Earth orbit (LEO), you are inside the inner radiation belt, where radiation dose is similar to that experienced by high altitude aircraft – more than an airliner, but not terrible. Further out, in mid Earth orbit (MEO), where the GPS satellites live, they are not protected by the Van Allen belts – worse, this orbit is literally inside them. Outside the belts, you are essentially in deep space (details vary with how close to the Sun you happen to be, but the principles are similar).

There are two main sources of radiation in space – from our own star, the Sun, and from deep space. This basically involves charged particles moving at a substantial percentage of the speed of light, from electrons to the nuclei of atoms with masses up to roughly that of oxygen. These can cause direct damage, by smashing into the material from which chips are made, or indirectly, by travelling through the silicon die without hitting anything but still leaving a trail of charge behind them."

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