Solar panels in space are 5 time more expensive to build than on earth (not talking into account launching them to space), while being 5 to 10 time more efficient. They also degrade 5 to 10 time faster, not accounting for solar flares. Deorbiting solar panels (and satellites) is also a huge environmental issue, as I dislike heavy metal in my food (and you should too). It isn't a real issue yet because we didn't send enough up there for the quantities to be an issue, but idiots seems persuaded we should increase the quantity of heavy metal sent in orbit without fixing this issue first.

Even assuming "that's it", why not just install it in e.g. Morocco instead? It's not like space is any easier to access than the Sahara, and saving a few dozen ms of network latency isn't particularly valuable when your TTFT is measured in tenths of a second. Sure, sun synchronous orbits are a thing, but you also need more expensive panels and the comparative efficiency will decline over time vs land-based hardware as your chips fail (wasting that part of the resource budget) and the land hardware gets upgraded.

> "We'll need thousands of them!

> Yes, they know.

> Starlink is already planned for a scale of tens of thousands of satellites.

Meanwhile Google installed that many TPUs yesterday afternoon. The idea is still stupid.

So it'll be more like Hertzner[1] in space. Each node just doing its own thing.

Not sure about the cost perspective but, at least that makes more sense than a giant brick floating around.

[1]: https://lafibre.info/hetzner/over-200-000-servers-in-one-pla...

issue is land based will still be cheaper. there are lot of cool things we can do in space, i’m not convinced putting data center is one of them.