Oh is that all? Those are major data center concerns.
Don't forget the biggest one: an ocean-based system could be pulled up and serviced without the need for a human-rated rocket. Oh, and bandwidth/latency.
The ONLY benefit of space is that it doesn't require siting a major construction in a town full of angry residents, and it has abundant solar power. But given how much it costs to get the solar panels in orbit, that power sure ain't free.
As a side note, I don't understand why I keep seeing these wrong arguments on HN repeatedly. Like everything mentioned in this thread can easily be fact checked. Radiative cooling is solved, launch costs are going down, so power costs will pay themselves back very quickly, etc.
You can argue about specifics, like chips will get more sophisticated + power efficient and fabrication will be the true longterm bottleneck, or SMRs/fusion could reduce energy bottlenecks, but talking about cooling as if convective cooling is the only option is just nonsensical.
By that logic, climate change is also solved, just built a giant radiator.
"Just" is doing a lot of work there. SpaceX is planning to launch 100 GW of compute annually, that comes with ~ 2.5 square kilometers of radiator (assuming an optimistic 800K radiator temp and emissivity of 0.9, double sided)
Go for advanced carbon composites, you can do that with just 5,000 metrics tons or so of material. That's 34 starship launches just for the radiators. We haven't solved assembly, we haven't brought up power panels or core compute. Planned launch cadence that SpaceX hopes to reach end of this year: 12/year.
there is already a h100 in orbit
1GW of compute is a lot in 2026. comparing 100GW of annual compute to SpaceX 2026 goals does not make sense
if Starship launch cost predictions are accurate, data centers in space will happen within 10 years
This is emphatically not true at any scale in which this scheme makes sense. Be careful with including too many Musk boosters in your information diet.