Aside from the economics, the question is why do it in orbit vs on land (or sea)?

What are the regulatory/legal gains? Lack of jurisdiction means open slather?

What are the national security gains? Redundancy and resiliency by each satellite being a "micro-compute" connected by high speed laser links? So more resilient to attack?

Why do it at all?

▲

ygouzerh 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think the only reason is for legal purpose.

If data is downloaded illegally from space, stored in space and model trained on it... it will be a mess juridically if someone complain.

Same for model inference, it will be hard for a government to put controls on the model output.

▲

eldenring 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think the main draw is its elegance. You have very efficient power from the sun, put that directly into your compute, radiate it out. Energy is ~free, no heavy infrastructure required, just a closed circuit for computing.

	▲	rswail 17 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Elegance compared to a PV/Storage facility built next door to a data centre? It doesn't make sense right now, and won't for at least 5-10 years. By which time, this current round of hype will have burned up ~$1T if it doesn't fall apart from the current internal contradictions and lack of market/customers/uses. We're still on the uphill ride of the Gartner hype cycle, not even at the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" yet.
	▲	KeplerBoy 14 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		We also have very efficient power from the sun here on earth. I don't get how that is an argument.