alt Hacker Newsissue 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.
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.
Elon explained the logic at length in an interview: Cheaper != Available.
The availability of power is the constraint almost everywhere, no matter how much money you throw at it.
Gas turbine production has a many-year backlog. Everybody that can make the single-crystal superalloy turbine blades is fully booked for most of a decade and can't expand capacity for years (at least).
Meanwhile, putting a slightly larger solar panel onto a satellite is a trivial engineering excercise and has no blockers in 2026.
Disclaimer: Personally, I suspect all this AI-in-space "talk" from Elon is just cheap marketing to boost the IPO of xAI.