Sophia Space has secured a patent for a technology that could pave the way for solar-powered orbital data centers that passively radiate excess heat into space.
Developed in partnership with Caltech, Sophia’s architecture tackles a major hurdle in orbital computing: how to cool thousands of chips running artificial intelligence applications in space.
Traditional designs rely on satellite-wide radiator systems with heat pumps and circulating fluids. In contrast, Sophia plans to build flat, 4-inch-square modular tiles equipped with four processors each. The tiles draw power from solar cells on their sunlit side, and shed heat into the cold vacuum of space from their dark side.
This approach avoids having to put a cooling system in the central bus of every satellite, said Leon Alkalai, Sophia Space’s co-founder, chairman and chief technology officer. “I think you will find in time that our approach is much more favorable when we scale to larger wattage systems, because bringing everything into a bus can only be done until a certain level, and then it becomes almost impossible to do,” he told me. “Our benefit is really scalability.”
