Ramez Naam

speaker

373 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 16 Jul

Ramez Naam’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Pomp Podcast · Why Elon Wants to Put Data Centers in Space | Ramez Naam · 16 Jul 2026 podcast

on planet Earth.

And it's probably, for the time being, until Starship is at that scale, it's probably cheaper to cover the deserts of the world with solar and batteries that work 24-7 to build these data centers.

You see the first signs of projects that pencil like that in the UAE.

In Chile, we have solar plus battery projects that are baseload solar that are cheaper than behind-the-meter gas.

So I expect the world to start

doing some of that for data centers as well.

Yeah, cooling is just physics, right?

So space is an insulator.

There's no convective cooling.

There's no conductive cooling.

You touch space, and no heat leaks out.

But you build giant radiators, big aluminum fins with special coatings on them.

They radiate heat.

So it just comes down to sort of a mass equation, and that comes down to cost.

You just have to launch a lot of aluminum fins to be able to radiate that heat away.

And that just adds to the weight and adds to the cost.

You can do it.

Now, you do have some other complications.

you're going to have to have these cooling loops filled with maybe something like ammonia or some other coolant and pumps and circulators and compressors.

And that adds to the moving part count, which, again, adds to the possibility of things breaking.

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