> Let's assume two premises: > 1. Demand for AI compute will continue to grow for the next 10 years. 2. The cost of orbital datacenters will approach the cost

> Let's assume two premises: > 1. Demand for AI compute will continue to grow for the next 10 years. 2. The cost of orbital datacenters will approach the cost of terrestrial datacenters (in $ per token terms). > If you don't buy either of these two premises (and I agree that neither is guaranteed) then you don't have to worry. No one is going to waste money on orbital datacenters if they aren't profitable. I'm glad you said the final quoted paragraph; while it has always been difficult to tell which websites are accurate vs. slop, and moreso today with fully automated slop, I see claims the current rate is doubling between 15 and 3 months. Even at the slowest of these, 15 months, this gets 2^(120/15) = 256x growth in 10 years, which would raise it significantly above current total global electrical demand: https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from-ai https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from... > A 100MW datacenter will emit 1.5 million tons of CO2 over a 5 year lifetime (given average USA energy sources). In contrast, 10 Starship launches (~1,000 tons to orbit) will emit no more than 40,000 tons of CO2. Almost all other environmental effects will be proportional. Not so: given that existing power capacity is already a constraining factor for new ground-based data centres, the alternative to be considered is not the CO2 emissions of existing average USA energy sources, but the CO2 emissions of new energy sources. This may be many things, but given that renewables are now the cheapest new energy, if politics stops renewables in the US it just means the data centres (especially at this kind of scale) aren't going to be in the US, but it doesn't say that they'll be in space specifically.