this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
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Isn't one of the big complaints against data centers is the massive demand on water used for cooling? How are they going to cool these in space which is notoriously hard to cool things down in?
Don't they put plutonium reactors in space? Have to be able to cool those somehow? Or maybe they are not difficult to cool... I know I have seen pretty massive heat fin stacks on satellites.
Honestly if they are hyper focused on putting data centers SOMEWHERE this seems like a less bad option... Maybe I'm missing the bigger picture somehow.
The ones that power spacecraft generate less than 5000W of heat at max power (while producing 300W of usable electricity).
In order to power a single server rack of 72 Blackwell GPUs, which takes about 130,000 watts, you'd need about 430 of those RTGs, and need to manage cooling requirements of 430 times as much (plus however much additional power will be required by the cooling system itself, too).