But space is very cold, so no problem there /sarcasm

> It stops making sense the second you ask how you’d dissipate the heat any GPU would create.

The answer, as you surmised, is indeed radiators.

You have a dark radiating side on the back of the solar panels. You can spread the GPUs around the solar panels. All the energy in comes from the sun so the temperature should be much the same as any dark panel like object floating in sunlight in space.

Or something like that - the temperature goes hot and cold as the things go into light and shadow so they have insulation.

No, temperature does not decrease significantly when objects are in the shadows, unless hey stay there for a long time. Even when they don’t get energy from solar radiation, they still dissipate it by radiative transfer, which is very inefficient. So they cool down slowly.

I assume the idea is that they'll be in a solar orbit, so there will be a perpetually sun facing side and a perpetually shaded side. The exact physics behind radiating the heat out in this setup are unclear to me, but it seems difficult to imagine that it would pose significant, let alone insurmountable, difficulties.

Random objects floating in space do not have GPUs on them which generate heat. You need to move the heat from GPUs to a radiator, so you are describing the actual solution of radiators in a roundabout way. Radiators weigh an amount and cost money. The consequence of factoring this in with optimistic assumptions is that it's about 1/4 as efficient to build space compute as earth compute. It's hype bullshit.

Elon already answered this type of question before, albeit quite sarcastically iirc, tho I can't find the tweet right now

Elon is not a good person to ask on technical matters like this given both his history of saying really silly things about space-related technologies and his enormous incentive to lie to attract investors.

Elon cannot change the laws of Physics, is not a serious person, and has no particular engineering skills. He is not authoritative on almost anything. He’s just cosplaying.

Consider this: people chose the far right to ban marijuana legalization, only to have the far right controlled by drug-addicted tech buddies. Choosing the left simply means non-drug-using politicians tolerating drug use by the homeless; choosing the far right, on the other hand, directly allows self-producing and self-consuming drug dealers and users (whether it's actual drugs or the "spiritual opium" of social media) to rule America. You might think the far right is the kind of people who want you to return to a comfortable rural life, but the real far right rulers are the ones who want to spread the Chinese Satanism and the Chinese model of cyberpunk dystopia—with its tens of millions of cameras that can turn on your smart device at any time to take nude photos—to the United States.