Cooling a data centre on Earth can consume 10 to 30 per cent of its energy budget and millions of litres of water

By Space Daily Editorial Team 

Keeping a data centre cool on Earth is a surprisingly large part of the job. Cooling can swallow anywhere from a tenth to a third of a facility’s entire energy budget, and the thirstiest sites drink millions of litres of water to do it. Move that data centre into orbit and the whole approach collapses. There is no air to blow across the servers, no cooling towers, and no river to dump the heat into. The only way left to get rid of waste heat is to radiate it away as infrared light into the blackness of space, through vast panels. That single fact shapes everything about the idea of computing in orbit.