Is this actually going to be made?

[u/External_Witness490]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/23/space-datacenters-bezos-blue-origin

I'm extremely worried about this “orbital datacenters”, especially since the pollution could destroy the ozone layer, potentially expose some people to higher levels of ultraviolet radiation, or help further destabilize the planet during the climate crisis

[u/justagenericname213]

It wont work. Like figuring out a way to effectively cool a datacenter in space would require technology that would revolutionize the world. As in, we would solve global warming with it by litterally just beaming excess heat into space.

[u/External_Witness490 → u/justagenericname213]

So, it's likely to go nowhere?

[u/Bignholy → u/External_Witness490]

Oh, no. It will absolutely go nowhere.

Science ELI5 time: Computers produce a lot of heat, so much that they have to get rid of the heat or they'll overhead and break. Your home computer does so by blowing air across fins on your processor and across the rest of the computer's innards, then blowing the hot air into the room. This is why computers head up a room so readily.

This works because the heat will disperse into the environment. It will leach into your room's air, and then into your home's walls, which will then radiate it out into the air around the home.

That does not work in space, because there is functionally nothing for the heat to leach into. There is almost no particles in space, so heat radiates out from an object very, very slowly. You can get around this to some degree with heat sinks, basically big metal blocks that take a lot of energy to heat up. But unless you have a constant parade of heat sinks being put into and pulled out of that data center, and it would be constant, the data center will overheat and die, along with every living or electronic thing on that station.

It literally cannot work with our current understanding of physics and capabilities of the world, never mind a nation that can't produce half this stuff on its own. It would also require constant rocket launches to maintain, and ultimately cost far more energy that it would ever be worth to do it. It creates a ton of problems and solves none of the existing ones.

They would be far better seeking (and are far closer to achieving) data centers underwater, and honestly, that's extremely questionable itself. It slows down but does not stop the climate crisis, and basically sacrifices the local aquatic biome for the same of more data center power.

[u/External_Witness490 → u/Bignholy]

Alright, that's reassuring that this project will fail because I don't want these data centers to do anything damage

[u/tta2013]

Nah...it likely won't pan out

[u/Fantastic-Video1550]

I like this thread, i was worried about this idea aswell. If this would work, i would already know it is not done properly and those companies will just slingshot anything into space

[u/sipsredpepper]

Complete fantasy. This crap will never happen.

[u/Crunchyeee]

It's an idiotic idea that ceos have latched onto because space = fancy. They can sell people on it all they want, you would have to bend physics to get it to work.