The idea that space is an ideal place to cool computers is one of the most persistent misconceptions in modern tech.

Yes, space is cold. 

But it’s also a vacuum, and that changes much of what we know when it comes to operating data centers. Heat from your hardware has no real way to leave unless you radiate it away. So even though space sits just above absolute zero, it is not the effortless heat sink the many assume. You have to engineer your heat's release. And that, curiously, can become a serious constraint the moment you try to scale.

For example, dumping a megawatt of waste heat takes roughly 1,200 square meters of radiator area. Think about lining up almost three basketball courts just to cool a single megawatt. If you scale further, the radiator area balloons, making the payload mass and geometry practically unworkable. Companies trying to repurpose their terrestrial designs for space are indeed learning this the hard way.

Yet the tech industry keeps talking about orbital data centers. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that in “a decade or so” we’ll see space as a normal place to build them. Elon Musk has been sketching out entire constellations, talking about “hundreds of gigawatts” of solar-powered compute in orbit. And Jeff Bezos argues that the “giant training clusters” we’re all building will be better off in space because of that near constant solar power.

All of this is not surprising. 

Earth is running low on low-friction real estate for compute. Data centers are already close to three percent of global electricity draw, and the demand curve is going vertical. Power, cooling, permitting, land, community opposition … none of these are getting easier. And demand, driven by AI workloads, is accelerating.

Something has to give.

But if we're serious about putting compute into orbit, we'll also need to grapple with a hard truth: space is not a free heat sink. Treating it like one risks repeating these same design mistakes, just at orbital scale.

This is where much of today’s orbital compute rhetoric falls short. Many proposals implicitly assume that terrestrial data center architectures can simply be adapted, bolted onto launch vehicles, and made to work in space. In practice, radiator mass, structural complexity, and thermal bottlenecks quickly dominate those designs. 

The industry needs a mindset shift.

Rather than treating cooling as an appendage, something you add after compute and power are defined, Sophia Space is designing systems where thermal management IS the architecture. In orbit, the shape, orientation, and material composition of a compute platform are indeed thermal decisions.

In other words, it's really about time we abandon these Earth-centric perspectives. 

Because while it may be the AI boom that pushes compute beyond our planet, it's the sheer physics that will decide what actually survives once it gets there … which means the industry better start designing for that reality now.

And that's just what we're doing at Sophia Space.