There is lots and lots and lots of space on Earth where hardly anyone is living. Cheap rural areas can support extremely large datacenters, limited only by availability of utilities and workers.

▲

awei 15 hours ago | parent [-]

We also have to build a lot more solar and nuclear in addition of the datacenters themselves, which we need to do anyway but it would compound the land we use for energy production.

▲

LegionMammal978 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Yet a colossal number of servers on satellites would require the same energy-production facilities to be shipped into orbit (and to receive regular maintainence in orbit whenever they fail), which requires loads of land for launch facilities as well as processing for fuel and other consumable resources. Solar might be somewhat more efficient, but not nearly so much so as to make up for the added difficulty in cooling. One could maybe postulate asteroid mining and space manufacturing to reduce the total delta-V requirement per satellite-year, but missions to asteroids have fuel requirements of their own.

If anything, I'd expect large-scale Mars datacenters before large-scale space datacenters, if we can find viable resources there.

	▲	awei 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It makes sense, I would be curious to see the price computations done by the different space GPUs startups and Big Tech, I wonder how they are getting a cheaper cost, or maybe it is marketing.