It's hard for an uprising of poor people to shut it off. It's the ideal place to run your CEO / President simulations.

I say this tongue in cheek, but in all seriousness, I can't really think of any other benefit, and I no longer have a lot of faith in the good sense of some of the people involved.

> What is the benefit of "moving compute to space"?

I’ll bite. It’s cheaper and quicker to permit a launch than permit, zone and interconnect a datacenter. And solar panels in space don’t need glass cladding, which makes them cheaper to make and lift.

The downside is launch cost. But there is a breakeven between these factors that seems to have most of its error bars within Starship’s target. (By my math, around $35/kg.) So if Starship works, and all indications seem to show that it will, eventually, then that puts space-based data centers at cost parity with terrestrial ones within a decade. Which was, well, unexpected when I ran the numbers.

(The surprising finding when you run the numbers is launching the chips and solar panels isn’t the limiter, it’s launching the radiators. Which opens up whole new questions about at what scale it makes sense to stop sending those up the well.)

That xAI fails faster, hopefully.

Here's an explainer video: https://youtu.be/Jth4yATniS4?si=zIzZXwLk6RTgyeCQ&t=37