You are right in that it is simple, but it is simple in the worst way; you can’t just shed heat in space. You have to convert it and radiate it away, which takes infrastructure and power. If the ISS had the compute capacity of a datacenter, the required radiators would engulf the station.
Also, datacenters are manned. Things break. In space, you need to either leave the earth’s protective magnetosphere or do constant station-keeping because you’re close to the atmosphere. If you leave the magnetosphere, you have to shield all of your electronics which adds a lot of weight and you can forget using the latest CPUs because they can’t handle the high energy particle bombardment, even with shielding.
https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/07/all-radiators.html
You are right in that it is simple, but it is simple in the worst way; you can’t just shed heat in space. You have to convert it and radiate it away, which takes infrastructure and power. If the ISS had the compute capacity of a datacenter, the required radiators would engulf the station.
Also, datacenters are manned. Things break. In space, you need to either leave the earth’s protective magnetosphere or do constant station-keeping because you’re close to the atmosphere. If you leave the magnetosphere, you have to shield all of your electronics which adds a lot of weight and you can forget using the latest CPUs because they can’t handle the high energy particle bombardment, even with shielding.