alt Hacker NewsWhat about on the Moon? My understanding is that heat is the killer. There you could sink pipes into the surface and use that as a heat sink. There are “peaks of eternal light” near the poles where you could get 24/7 solar power.
Latency becomes high but you send large batches of work.
Probably not at all economical compared to anywhere on Earth but the physics work better than orbit where you need giant heat sinks.
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The Moon doesn't have a magnetic field, though, so the second half of the article discussing difficulties due to radiation would still apply, right?
I had this same thought and mentioned it on an ArsTechnica forum. There was reply that suggested that lunar regolith wouldn't be a good heat sink and a bit of googling makes me think this is probably true.
That said anything has to be better then almost literally nothing so I'm still holding out for datacenters on the moon.
You'd have most of the problems of building in space, an abrasive quasi-atmosphere of dust, half a month of darkness every month, and not as good of a heat sink as the Earth's atmosphere.