iancmceachern

https://mantle3d.com/

This talk will help put it in perspective: https://californiaconsultants.org/event/energy-and-thermal-m...

In order to talk about these things we need to think about the power from the grid, all the way to the cooling water coming out. Not just talk about how we can calculate or optimize each little piece. Of course we can do that, it's the overall system we are talking about and need to understand.

Forest for the trees.

What do I mean by that here?

He does the calculations for 20 kW. Which sounds like a lot. It's only enough to cool one node, not one rack, one node, in a modern data center. The starlink satellite he referenced is viewed as the absolute most modern thermal design in a satellite.

Most data centers have 2000-5000 nodes and the hyperscalers have 100,000 or more.

So to replace a single data center we need 2000-5000 of these things up there, at a minimum, or one thing that is 2000-5000 times bigger.

And maintenance.

And the hardware gets obsoleted every few years.

Or you could just put it in the desert in Nevada. But we don't need rockets to get there.