Why space data centers? What advantage this would have? Cooling will be a big issue, while it is easily solved on the planet earth, as we have water, air that can transfer heat away.
People point to the cost of land, but if being physically inaccessible isn’t a problem, then there are lots of cheap places on Earth you can deploy data centres too at far lower cost than launching them into orbit.
If a state, or even rich billionaire, wanted to take out your data centre in low earth orbit, it's only a few million dollars to launch a retrograde rocket which explodes into 10 ton of shrapnel, or even less to forget the orbit and just launch it directly up.
It's a declaration of war much the same.
I don't think people are looking at this the right way. They need to be inaccessible to terrestrial and air weapons, have lower latency, not be dependent on power plants, etc.
People have been talking about waging war in space for many decades now. All the arguments for and against it were made a very long time ago, and it was decided it's a hell of a lot better that way. Even a nuclear blast in orbit is more tolerable.
Space superiority is just too damn appealing as the next frontier after land, air, and sea where we've been stuck in stalemate for a while. It's perfectly natural we go to space for this, including the datacenters.
It's thus far easier for Iran to hit an LEO DC than one in Colorado
Are you saying it's not?
I'm actually not even sure your suggestion is true. Theoretically they don't need to launch a missile and could attempt to infiltrate a data center instead. They're secure but not that secure against a determined enemy with any amount of real training.
These aren’t capabilities Iran has. Certainly not anymore.
The Utah Data Center [0] is a 200 acre plot with 35 acres of buildings.
Even prime farmland values is arround $10k an acre, or $2m, but for other land you're talking $400k for that much land [1]
It uses 65MW. The solar panels alone to generate that cost $100 per kW in bulk, or $6.5m.
That's 570GWh a year.
Mount Signal 1 Solar plant, from over a decade ago, produces about that currently. Total cost $365m [2].
Then there's the lifetime? What do you do in 36 months time when you want to replace the hardware with the latest generation? In an earthbound one you turn off the rack, remove the old kit, put the new kit in. In space, it just burns up in the atmosphere.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
[1] https://www.land.com/property/201-acres-in-brown-county-nebr...
a 1m2 at 70C radiates 785 Watt. Seems thet cooling will be more simple than on Earth.
Cooling isn't an issue.