Of course, there are still a lot of unknowns, any of which could prove fatal to the concept but I'm no longer comfortable just dismissing it as "obviously ridiculous."
It is physically possible, but it won't have positive ROI so it is not viable.
If you have a paper/post doing the calculations for positive ROI, I'd be all ears. It can even have the optimistic Elon assumptions about price of mass to orbit.
Also, how is a constellation of satellites any easier in this case? They all need extremely large radiators, they all need maintenance, they all need high bandwidth communication.
If you calculate the actual cooling requirements for megawatts of server, you end up with needing many, many football fields of cooling.
It's nonsensical. Sure you can make the numbers sort of work for a single server, but a single server on earth costs MUCH MUCH less to launch, maintain, etc. So why bother doing it in space? We just end up with loads of unusable space servers as they gradually breakdown and cannot be repaired.
And if he's actually capable of producing solar panels in the quantity that he's talking about in the time frame that he's talking about -- why doesn't he just put them on earth to solve our growing climate change problems and fuel shortages?
Well, yeah but that's just Elon being Elon. At this point I think even the most pro-Elon folks freely admit "The first rule of Elon is: 'Ignore everything he says about timeframes and scale.'"
Is a good start