There are no NIMBYs in space. No government permitting on land use. And solar power is plentiful. It's like having a dollar store Dyson sphere.

Making use of that is predicated entirely on being able to put a lot of hardware into space cheaply. SpaceX is the undisputed best at that, no one comes close. The question is whether their "best" is good enough to make space datacenters economical.

That won’t ever be the case. It’s pure grift. There is literally no other actual reason

I am surprised how many people say that there is no reason to put data centers in orbit, when, at the same time, data centers are becoming the hated thing du jour all over the US and politicians left and right (but mostly left-of-center) are touting bans and restrictions to their electorates.

It is definitely to escape most political pressures on Earth. They will never be able to sidestep the US feds, but aside from an open war with China or Russia, all other authorities are out of the game when it comes to space.

The data link between earth and space has so much bandwidth.

There are sensors in space that send data to earth it gets processed and then the data is sent back to space then to the end user back on earth. If you do the compute in space you save the space-earth transfer time twice. Latency and availability of bandwidth are both factors.

There may be limited utility for this outside of military.

Because dirt cheap land usually does not have dirt, cheap water or dirt cheap electricity.