According to SpaceX's own filing documents, you are incorrect. They must be principally an AI company to justify anything close to their current valuation.
The rocket business is hardly profitable. The whole valuation is based around grok and space datacenters. He needs to keep pumping the hype or else we are in for the worlds biggest crash.
Space data centers without in space manufacturing & resource mining are of course stupid. But in space infra is what is necessary for humans to move beyond Earth & that's the critical bit, that enables everything else in the long term.
Local protests didn't stop Colossus 1 or Colossus 2.
Local protests also didn't stop Space-X. People around his DCs or Space-X still suffer today.
He had to come up with some magic story. The Payload increased only due to his Starlink. But even then, the payload into space is basically non existend.
2025 was the year with the most payload and its only 5000t.
And for us as human beings, a DC in space is the worst case scenario. This will create a lot of stress on our atmosphere (potential, reentry poisning of our atmosphere with lithium and aluminium), co2 usage and the loose of real resources.
He will send metals into space to burn them later into our atmopshere. Limited resources we as a planet have.
And for what? For a DC? A DC which you can put in any dessert on our planet for cheap energy and not having any neighbours.
Only Edge DCs need low latency, your training clusters don't need low latency to end user, plenty of inferencing jobs don't need low latency either.
Not to be pedantic, but although the datacenters are running Nvidia hardware, Tesla did develop their own 20-core/3-npu high bandwidth chip for their cars. It's nowhere near the computational ability of any datacenter GPU, but at 150+ TOPS it's no slouch either.