alt Hacker NewsIt's a solved problem. The physics is simply such that it's really inefficient.
> ... we'd need a system 12.5 times bigger, i.e., roughly 531 square metres, or about 2.6 times the size of the relevant solar array. This is now going to be a very large satellite, dwarfing the ISS in area, all for the equivalent of three standard server racks on Earth.
https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
The gist of it is that about 99% of cooling on earth works by cold air molecules (or water) bumping into hot ones, and transferring heat. There's no air in space, so you need a radiator 99x larger than you would down here. That adds up real fast.
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That’s the secret plan - cover LEO with solar cells and radiators, limiting sunlight on the ground, rendering ground base solar ineffective, cool earth and create more demand for heating; then sell expensive space electricity at a huge premium. Genius!
A really painfully laboured way of just saying conduction.
I think you may be thinking of cooling to habitable temperatures (20c). You can run GPUs at 70c , so radiative cooling density goes up exponentially. You should need about 1/3 of the array in radiators.