1: https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/catalyst-building-inferen...
AI inference gives them a great way to turn revenue from cheap electricity without solving the device-to-shore problem yet for that energy.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/09/worlds-first-w...
It has the killer feature of allowing a human to walk up to a rack and replace a component.
NIMBY stuff is why we will go to space. In space nobody can tell you “no.”
It is assumed that if you want to build lots of data centers up north, you also need to invest in infrastructure. I've seen discussion about smaller modular nuclear power plants, but those things take years. Another thing could be other renewable energy sources.
The replacability is nice, but even in terrestrial data centers there are situations where something fails and it never gets replaced, just routed around, until the pod gets ripped out and replaced in its entirety.
Advocating for exacerbating the melting of the polar ice cap, which will endanger dozens of millions of people, just to have more convenient data centers for manufacturing AI slop, is peak HN.
To make it worse, underwater tech is notoriously hard to make operationally visible. Sabotage is trivial and undifferentiable from failure and honest error. When we used to work in trading subsea cable cuts in Asia would constantly ruin our best networks. Everyone had point to point microwave expressly because it wasn’t breakable in this way. Exposing compute to this rather than just networking would have doomed the entire enterprise.
He should look at renting space on container ships before considering orbital DCs, IMO. But that doesn't satisfy the critical "Rocket company needs something to do" constraint.
Sounds terrific actually haha. Boy would that be a sight to behold.
0: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nautilus-puts-sto...
There are thousands of container ships in international waters at any given time, so you wouldn't install a few massive power-hungry data centers on a few ships. You'd put a lot of PV-powered data centers on a lot of ships. Pretend you launched them into space, in other words... but don't actually launch them.
And yes, you'd network them via Starlink, just like the satellites would be.
Regardless, every time this guy does something super capital intensive, it looks stupid and then works out for him. So long as it keeps happening, the probability that he is just much smarter than me and predicting the future better dominates the probability that he keeps getting lucky.
I think the specific attraction to space is the copious massive amounts of free solar energy, isn't it?
(In reality, they want to build the torment nexus at the Lagrange points because that would just be edgy-as-fuck)
Yes you get more energy harvest from solar above the atmosphere and can orient them to always be pointed towards the sun. But it is still so much more expensive than building out conventional solar in the Sun Belt, which is so much more expensive than just building a massive natural gas plant right next to people's homes.
No, space is desirable because there is no local permitting authority that can push back. People living near data centers have gotten wise to the fact that local people pay most of the externalities of data centers and AI, but the benefits mostly go elsewhere, and the jobs created during construction are temporary. In space, you don't have to lobby/bribe local politicians and astroturf a YIMBY movement.
That's true of just about every industrial, commercial, civic, or residential site. It's the fundamental premise behind every NIMBY protest ever. The benefit of each individual site always runs disproportionately to people further away. It's only in the aggregate, i.e. each individual enjoying the cumulative externalized benefits from far-off, that the equation could ever balance.