this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
751 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
86249 readers
3116 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The ISS is rated for 84kw and runs substantially cooler, they wont actually be that big. They will be smaller than the ISS whatever they end up being.
The temperature of the radiators scale to the 4th power.
It was more of a, it this is the worst case limit.
The radiators are rated at 14kw a pair. There is other cooling mechanisms that are used and you are using the combined total. This scale and resource requirements become quickly ridiculous for launching that many radiator arrays alone.
Your math is all over the place. And this isnt any kind of scientific.
Straight from NASA
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/473486main_iss_atcs_overview.pdf
And raising the temperature factually increase the radiators capability to the 4th power, and the ISS runs at a cooler temperature than these GPUs need to run at, thus these radiators will be smaller. (edit: source For a given amount of waste heat, the lower the rejection temperature, the larger the required radiating surface. For radiation heat transfer, the quantity of heat rejected is proportional to the fourth power of temperature; therefore, the area requirements increase rapidly as the temperature decreases. T)
I've been pretty consistent in this entire post on the 70kW but max rated for 84kW, but i might have been wrong about the 84 part mixing that up with something else.
I've been consistent with the AI datacenter being - 125kw avg, 150kw peak as well. 2x ISS before accounting for temperature difference is 140kW which is < 2x average, but not quite peak which is 2.15x.
There is no way these will be bigger than 2x what the ISS has.
Edit: e.g post saying 84 & 70
https://lemmy.world/post/48895224/24572272
https://lemmy.world/post/48895224/24559267
Edit: Looks like you were working off of older data