Right now, it's a terribly dumb idea. Here's why:
- Getting shit to space is expensive
- Cooling those data centers would require radiative cooling. The radiators for that would have to be crazy huge.
- It's economically unviable when you can build data centers on earth.
For me, this looks exactly like the "we're going to Mars, so invest in our space company, yipeeeee" thing.
That being said, could we see space based computation in the future? Sure. Again, here's why:
- It's more to do with simple energy consumption (not just for computation, but just energy consumption in general).
- Energy consumed still stays on the planet as heat. Slowly, it radiates away to space. The speed of radiation however scales with the surface area of the planet. Meaning, there's a strict upper limit of how much "energy consumption" we can do on earth before causing crazy global warming due to this waste heat. Note this is NOT green house gas caused warming. This is caused by more heat on the planetary surface than exiting. Waste heat
- Ok, so assuming that energy consumption increases 1% per year after the "exponential phase" begins, the planet Earth ITSELF would reach its limits from the standpoint of holding industry in less than a thousand years. The exponential phase for us seems to have started since the industrial revolution. Also, our current increase of energy consumption year over year is quite above 1%. Here's the paper.
- Hence, for environmental reasons, there would come a time in human history where we have to put our industry (which includes data centers) in space. Anywhere but Earth.
Could we develop systems with crazy efficiency? Sure. Maybe. I don't know. But even if we do, I can't see a case where the Hedonic treadmill wouldn't set in, still causing crazy energy consumption.
Hence, in conclusion, boo to current space companies grifting space based data centers. But yay to eventually putting all industry off planet.