Ariel Ekblaw
speaker
1,219 appearances
5 recordings
4 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 26 Jun
Ariel Ekblaw’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The first thing I think we should cover for data centers is space is not cold in the way that people think in the context of, oh, therefore it must be easy to cool data center electronics in space.
Unfortunately, it's not that easy.
In space, you don't have convective cooling.
So if you think about how data centers are cooled on Earth, you literally, you flow water through something that's touching close to the data center or you flow air through them and it cools them down because that fluid passing by is
helps distribute the heat.
In space, there's no fluid and there's no air mass.
So you don't have the same mechanism of just having passive air or even pushed air to go through your electronics.
You mostly depend on radiative cooling.
And that's hard.
So it's not that it's better to put data centers in space because space is going to keep them cold.
That's not the case.
It's actually that if you're facing permitting issues on Earth because of townships struggling with the water burden or the grid burden.
or you want to get the carbon footprint of all of this energy from the data centers off of Earth and into space, space offers one massive advantage, which is raw, unfiltered sunlight above the atmosphere, so a much more efficient way to get closer to that energy.
Is it the simplest place to put a data center?
No.
Is it necessarily the most engineering efficient way?
You know, we could have a little argument about whether it is or isn't.
I think Elon is really arguing that it is.
There are certain aspects like radiative heat transfer that make it difficult, but not insurmountable.
So that's kind of where we are.
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