>>I don't buy the opposition to orbital datacenters. I think that's just the perfect being the enemy of the good, which (sadly) is very common in environmental

>>I don't buy the opposition to orbital datacenters. I think that's just the perfect being the enemy of the good, which (sadly) is very common in environmental activism. The opposition is from people who have a brain and like to use it. And dont engage on Musk next cheap trick to sustain his chimerical stock valuations. A 100 MW datacenter in vacuum takes from you "put a man on the Moon" to "lets host Kubernetes on the Sun" :-)) Just to start, a 100 MW datacenter is a 100 MW toaster. On Earth, the waste heat would go into into air or water. In orbit, it can only leave by radiation. So you need a massive radiator area, plus pumps, coolant loops, structure, pointing, redundancy, and micrometeorite protection... Then you need radiation hardened GPUs, DRAM, SSDs, optics, and power electronics and those are not going to magically become space rated because the pitch deck has a Mars picture on it. Also on earth datacenters these parts constantly fail. There was even some recent study of about 20% of GPUs failing within 3 years, and humans constantly have to replace them. In orbit, you would have space mission to swap the bad PSU... If you make the calculations, at normal electronics temperatures, rejecting the amount of heat needs a radiator field on the order of 500 m x 500 m under ideal assumptions... Then you neede power, and that has the same scale problem. Meaning you need an enormous solar farm, but wait...what about the scenario of a eclipse? For 30 minutes without sunlight you need about 50 MWh of storage. Musk is a moron, and this video of him explaining it as simply radiative is proof number 256 you can be an idiot, and a billionaire. And shame on Jensen Huang for not calling him out: https://youtu.be/trgn7s5-YHc?t=140 https://youtu.be/trgn7s5-YHc?t=140