Best cost to orbit I am seeing is $1500/kg. A GPU rack is ~1500kg. Let’s imagine you can take a terrestrial data center rack, no scaffolding, solar panels, radiators, radios, propellant, or propulsion. Fly it into orbit, kick it out the airlock, and let it work through magic. That’s $2.2 million to get into position.
Industrial power rates are cheap, say $.10/kwh, but pretend you sign terrible deals, and it costs you $.30/kwh to run and cool a terrestrial GPU rack. A 150kw unit will then be (150x24x365x.3) =$394k/year.
You can operate the terrestrial version for 5.7 years before the two hit parity.
They're projecting the learning curve, that the more you do it the cheaper it gets, continues arbitrarily far.
However, they recon it will take SpaceX launching 370,000 tons to LEO to make the costs come down enough to be worth it: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19468
Even my bull case put that 10 years off, which is so far away it lacks relevance just because tech moves so much faster than that timescale; my bear case says that's about 45 years off.
5 years is a standard depreciation cycle for hardware, but plenty of machines last longer than that, but these satellites will not. On top of that, power distribution, cooling etc in the data centers is a huge percentage of cost and lasts much longer than 5 years.
If you think you can make a space air conditioner for less than a terrestrial one, I have a bridge to sell you.
Starlink satellites already use silicon solar cells, since they too are cost sensitive and don't have long lifespans:
https://starlink.com/public-files/Starlink_Approach_to_Satel...
On the Starlink V2 mini satellite, we predict that approximately 5% of the mass of the entire satellite could survive reentry. The biggest contributor (~90% of the surviving mass) is silicon from the solar cells, which has a high melting point...
[1] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(26)00362-4
Someone else said the facility needs 370MW. Great, because SMR designs provide 470MW. That’s 100MW excess, given for free to locals to entice them to support the project. That can power 40k homes, easily. People object to these projects partly because their bills go up? Cool, those bills disappear now.
But no, I guess we’re creating massive arrays in space and polluting the night sky forever.