Why put data centers in space?

1:23:10data centers have issues, right? Where is the power going to come from? Where's the water going to come from? Who's going to build it? >> Yeah. Who's going to pay for it? >> Yeah. There's a lot of nimbiness going on. And in this case, the nimbiness is a good thing, right? We don't want >> I don't want data centers in my neighborhood. Okay. >> I might want the AI, but I really don't want the data [laughter] centers, right? And so that's why people are looking into space now. People have already started looking. This is StarCloud. It's a startup that's backed by Nvidia. Google is doing its own thing. And there's a lot of smart people betting on this thing. Here it shows a 5 gawatt data center. >> Crazy. >> But the radiator that you would need to dissipate all that heat with radiation

1:23:52is something like a 4 km square. >> And you have real um you know getting any payload into space is cost prohibitive. Yeah. >> 4 km wide will take a modular system, multiple launches. Yes. The cost of launches is going down. >> Yeah. >> Uh but >> still it's 4 km worth of >> stuff worth of [snorts] stuff, right? >> It's not a joke. >> It's not it's not trivial, right? And there's several important papers that are coming out trying to plan for this kind of thing like how do we develop carbon neutral data centers in space? I want to highlight this because this is in nature electronics. This is a top journal. Um, it's not impossible.

1:24:32There's a lot of rhetoric out there that's saying that data centers in space is impossible because of the vacuum of space and people need to take undergraduate physics. It's not true, right? Okay. It's hard, but that's a key distinction from it's impossible. Okay. We I mean, we obviously do it, right? The the International Space Station is already doing this. If we look at a photo of the International Space Station, the curved panels that we see, >> those are solar panels that are facing the sun. >> The the flat ones, those are radiators. Those are radiating out heat into space. So that the astron the astronauts that are on board don't get cooked alive. And all of the electronics that is, you

1:25:14know, doing computation, there's several computers up there, those don't get cooked alive. The way that works is using both convection and radiation. So you've got convection in that they use ammonia instead of water because ammonia has a low freezing point. If you [clears throat] use water then the water is just going to freeze when it gets to the radiator and then like what? So so so that's why you use ammonia. The ammonia uses convection to take the heat to the radiator and then the radiator takes that heat and radiates it out into space. Okay. Now what we want to do is make this thing cheaper and that is perhaps an engineering problem especially in the context of the paper that we've just covered. >> Mhm.

1:25:54>> I'd like to I'd like to pose that as a