The availability of power is the constraint almost everywhere, no matter how much money you throw at it.
Gas turbine production has a many-year backlog. Everybody that can make the single-crystal superalloy turbine blades is fully booked for most of a decade and can't expand capacity for years (at least).
Meanwhile, putting a slightly larger solar panel onto a satellite is a trivial engineering excercise and has no blockers in 2026.
Disclaimer: Personally, I suspect all this AI-in-space "talk" from Elon is just cheap marketing to boost the IPO of xAI.
Is the sunlight millions of times brighter beyond the atmosphere? I don’t get it.
Also, there's a populist backlash on building datacenters, power transmission infra, and power generation in many areas on earth. Locally, we have a number of people complaining about solar arrays going up on farmland, even though it's the farmers choosing to do it. "It's an eyesore".
Only in a Sun-synchronous orbit, at specific elevations. Most 'normal' orbits have periods of shade.
Example of a spec sheet: https://signaturesolar.imagerelay.com/share/ffc69ee2265b4613...
If you mean the farmers' arrays, those are meant for commercial generation, so a good bit bigger, but one nice thing about solar is it's extremely modular, and you can fit it to the land. I believe bigger panels are more common for commercial, but I think it's a lot nicer to handle 40-50 pound panels than 70 pound panels.
Because panel cap factor is about 10-20% to begin because day and night exists on earth. Say you wanted to power it on solar + batteries and picked Australia. You pick place that has decent port and most exposure, i.e. Port Hedland. In winter, daily average drops by 20%. Also because atmosphere - 30% less insolation when compared to space. Finally add 10-45% cooling losses.
Which effectively means you need something at least 10-20x more panels + batteries to match space.