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.
Right, but SpaceX has already filed plans with the FCC to launch a million of them, which is to say, 10K of your datacenter units. Tying back to the article, this plan is definitely going to require Starship and airline-like operations.
Dude, you realize that right now there are 100+s of data centers in construction around the world often in the 500MW to 1PW range? I.e. there are many, many datacenters (100s) in construction, right now, with 100s of MW up to multiple PW?
Scott's analysis is out by several orders of magnitude!
Everyone knows its "theoretically" possible to have a single server or a single rack in space.
The big and most obvious glaring miss is, how would it be economically viable and operationally viable to have datacenters in space which compete with datacenters on the ground.
We are experts are creating economically profitable (very profitable) datacenters on the ground, which work really well for inference and training, which are cooled really well, can be maintained easily, etc. The idea that we are going to have 100s of MW clusters or 1PW clusters in space, and they are going to be competitive economically, and we are going to be able to maintain them, and they are going to actually WORK (i.e. how will the networking be competitive with datacenters on earth), is frankly laughable.
Scott is totally talking rubbish on this.
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