[Dylan16807]

Sure.

The satellite way: we launch a hundred million big satellites (or fewer even bigger satellites).

The land way: we cover 15000 square kilometers of the sahara desert in solar panels, or half-cover 30000, either way that's less than a percent of it. And some of the corners of the solar fields get turned into actual datacenter.

They both sound very hard but I don't see any notable reason to favor the first one.

[bvcp]

and when the sun goes out?

[Dylan16807]

The number of solar panels I quoted is enough to average more than a terawatt across 24 hours. For the usage part of the equation, you need to overbuild your compute and/or have batteries. Those options are expensive but in exchange you don't need to space-proof or space-launch anything.

[bvcp]

how many batteries do you need for a terrawatt of compute? do we have industry capacity to even build that much?

[Dylan16807]

If you can build the solar panels and satellites, I believe in you to build the batteries.

Reaching this scale is a huge problem, but 90% of the problem is shared between the different components.