If they built it on the moon they could use the excess heat to melt ice for the crews water.
That would make routine maintenance of the data center a smidge harder.
CC
“This concept would be particularly useful for island cities like Singapore, where limited land leads to high real estate costs, making data centers even more expensive.”
Why not locate them in areas with abundant energy, optical lines and cooling water? With terabit low latency optical lines, you can locate them anywhere. Putting them in Singapore would be nuts. As would be having them in orbit.
I see absolutely zero problems with this approach. /mega sarc
Get other countries on board for the mutual benefits and this could lead to minimizing, possibly eliminating warfare on Earth, as it requires cooperation in a stable milieu to work.
Too much to hope for?
China has constructed an underwater data center using seawater for cooling, and an off shore wind farm for electricity.
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/worlds-first-commercial-underwater-data-centre
LEO doesn’t have 24/7 sunlight your birds go into earth’s shadow once per orbit...The planet is round guys. Course you could do polar orbits and part of the year your orbit would be edge on to the suns rays but the other part of the year 90 degrees further on earth’s path around the sun you are now perpendicular and get half an orbit of light and half of dark behind the planet.
GSO orbit gets nearly 24/7/365 sunlight due to it being far enough away and it’s angle to the ecliptic...
(Geosynchronous Orbit (GSO), the number of daylight hours per year is approximately 8,766, or about 99.8% of the time. The satellite is almost always in full sunlight, with interruptions occurring only during two “eclipse seasons” each year)
GSO is a LONNNNG way from LEO in delta V even Starship would struggle to put up space station sized data centers that far up earth’s gravity well. For only a little more delta V you can get to a L1,L2 point and then bring materials from the asteroid belt in as you are at the edge of the gravity well.
The best place for AI is the deserts use solar and nukes they complement each other when you use high temp sodium or gas cooled fast reacors with thermal storage and dry cooling systems supercritical CO2 turbines don’t need water cooling and you can use the same CO2 for cooling of your AI racks via a refrigeration cycle of supercritical CO2 through a turbo expander it’s sub zero gas then compress it back to 180+ F supercritical CO2 and dump that heat to dey sure it’s one of the best cycles thermodynamics wise for dry cooling it’s reject temp is so much above even desert heat levels have a delta T of 60 even in 120F air that’s much more than typical HVAC condenser coils. You don’t condense supercritical fluids at all so no phase change.
Best way to cool it is to shut it off... We need this like a hole in the head...
Lousy way to cool something.
My neighbor works for Alabama Power at the Barry Steam Plant (power generating facility). He said Alabama Power has signed a billion dollar contract to add capacity at this facility specifically to power an AI center.