[Townley]

It sounds like their vision for space-based data centers presupposes nearly-free energy costs, delivered via a colossal solar farm made possible by falling launch costs.

Temporarily putting aside (extremely fair) feasibility questions around those two pre-requisites, data centers are a not-bad choice for things to do with unlimited space energy.

Aluminum smelting or growing food are the two I’d think of otherwise, and neither of those can have inputs/outputs beamed to a global network of high-bandwidth satellites.

[gbear605]

Solar energy isn’t that much more efficient in Earth orbit than on Earth - maybe twice as efficient. That sounds nice, but you’re saving half of your solar panel cost while massively increasing every other cost.

[mplanchard]

The one benefit is being able to be in a synchronous orbit with the sun, so you don’t have to contend with night. However, that’s just another ~doubling of efficiency, which I think still nowhere near makes up for the additional costs.

[DrillShopper]

It also makes the cooling problem more difficult.

[mplanchard]

Yeah, it seems like the cooling is pretty much the number one implausible thing among a raft of implausible things