That is fucking hysterical. Let me do a quick list of issues with that approach (without having access to the article):
- Cooling. Yeah, space is cold, but it is also vacuum insulated. The only way you lose heat is through radiation, so you would need massive heat sink panels and a cooling system that routed the heat from the servers to those heat syncs. I'd love to see the calculation on a 1 GW data center, but I am guessing acres and acres of heat sinks.
- Maintenance. You'd need to have permanent staff to maintain the data center. Ok, maybe that could reduced through robots, but sooner or later you are going to need a human to do something.
-Energy. Similar to the cooling issue, you need bring in energy. Solar panels are the obvious solution, but a shit ton of solar panels. (I think the solar panels would be smaller than the heat sinks, as you are exchanging heat with the sun. (5000K to ~300K for energy incoming vs. ~300K to ~0K for energy discharge.)
- Material transfers. Computer parts wear out. Constantly and with significant mass for a large data center. You'd need to be launching computer parts regularly just to replace drives.