On Earth, cooling an AI data center is an active, energy-hungry process. Chillers, fans, pumps, water loops, and heat exchangers devour power simply to stop silicon from melting itself. Across the industry, cooling accounts for 30–40% of a data center's total electricity use. Efficient hyperscalers can get that down to ~7–10% with advanced liquid cooling and PUEs near 1.1, but most facilities (especially during the current AI build-out) still sit in the 30–40% range.

For the 100 kW AI Sat Mini, the solar arrays are approximately 900 m² (roughly 6 m wide × 150 m long) and the radiators are about 100 m². The chips will run at about 100 °C. This will keep the mass and satellite cost for AI mini satellite at about 10% of the cost of the energy.

Space based cooling will be about 25-30% of the cost of the cooling on earth and equal to the best earth based locations for AI.

xAI holds permits for 41 natural gas turbines in Mississippi drawing over a gigawatt to run Colossus. A significant fraction of that gigawatt — roughly 30–40% in a typical AI cluster — does not run computation. It runs cooling. That is hundreds of megawatts burned on chillers, fans, water, and heat exchangers just to keep the chips alive.

The IEA projects global data-center electricity will double to 945 TWh by 2030 — more than Japan uses today. Transformer lead times run three years. Grid queues stretch four. Every new gigawatt of compute also needs new cooling systems. Communities on Earth are fighting new data centers. They don't want the noise, water draw, or emissions.

In vacuum, radiation is the only cooling mechanism, and it scales with the fourth power of temperature. Raise a chip from 80 °C to 120 °C and the radiated power per square meter nearly doubles — for free, with zero extra hardware or electricity. The D3 chip being designed for Terafab's orbital satellites will run hotter than any terrestrial processor on purpose, to exploit this physics. At 100 °C with emissivity 0.90, a single satellite can reject 100 kW of waste heat through roughly 100 m² of radiator. No water. No fans. No grid. No permits.