It says "Starcloud plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with super-large solar and cooling panels approximately 4 kilometers in width and length."
So, it's the solar/cooling panels that make up that space, not the data centre per se.
I know. I'm saying what if you build lower density data centers that could be more passively cooled. Apparently being in space is no issue for latency, so I can't see why building it on earth in a remote-ish area would matter.
Should we be adding massive sources of heat (datacenters) to regions that can easily passively cool them? It sounds like that would be somewhere around the Arctics. These are already seeing record high temperatures both in winter and summer. Maybe if we manage to radiate all the heat directly back into space by mimicking snow…?
So, it's the solar/cooling panels that make up that space, not the data centre per se.