Scale. You can monetize on the people that don’t pay the $200/month. Obviously I have nothing to prove this statement, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the subscriptions are loss leaders.

Advertisers will pay MORE per user than users will. That is why they are so valuable to companies offering freemium services!

That's a constraint. It's not the constraint.

There are far too many variables still unknown to all parties. Anyone trying to say with certainty "X will lose", whether X is terrestrial or space based DCs, is lying and probably trying to sell you something.

> Watch Elon’s interviews. He is right.

90% of his predictions didn't materialize, he's full of shit, how do people keep falling for it over and over again?

I was going to say that you're parroting his interviews and then you outted yourself.

This sounds like Air conditioning in space.

But watching him battling basic physics is very funny, not gonna lie.

> would you mind quoting the relative cost of batteries vs. solar panels for a 150kW solar-powered satellite

OK.

At a good location (~25% capacity factor), you need about 600 kW of panels to average 150 kW. Utility-scale solar runs roughly $0.50–$1.00/W installed, so call it ~$450K–$600K. Overnight storage (say ~16 hours) requires ~2,400 kWh. Adding a buffer for cloudy days, say 4,000–7,000 kWh total. At roughly $200–$350/kWh (utility-scale Li-ion), that's ~$1M–$2M.

In a favorable orbit, capacity factor is ~90–100% (GEO or sun-synchronous), so you need roughly 160–170 kW of panels. Space-qualified solar panels historically cost $100–$300/W. Even optimistically at $50–$100/W with newer manufacturing, that's 167 kW * $100/W = ~$17M optimistically, or 167 kW * $200/W = ~$33M realistically. You also need space-rated power management, thermal systems, and radiation-hardened electronics.

Even ignoring launch costs entirely, space solar is roughly 10–20x more expensive than ground solar + batteries, driven almost entirely by the enormous cost premium of space-qualified solar panels. Ground-based solar is extraordinarily cheap now (~$0.50–1/W), while space-grade panels remain orders of magnitude more expensive per watt.

The ground option wins overwhelmingly. The space option would only start to make sense if space-grade panel costs dropped to near terrestrial levels, which would require a revolution in space manufacturing.

They lose 0.5% efficiency for every 1c above 25c, do you plan on having your space panels actively cooled?

FYI you'd need 2x the solar panels of the ISS to run a single rack of NVIDIA GB300, and microsoft just built a datacenter with 4600 of these racks.

With or without the rocket?

150kW solar kit seems to cost around $150k[1]. With the cost of launch with Falcon Heavy, this would pay for about 100kg of payload[2]. Each Starlink satellite weighs ~300kg[3] so I suspect a 150kW "datacenter" satellite would weight much more. Where are the savings supposed to come from? Seems like you could overprovision terrestrial solar panels by 3-4x and still obviously come out ahead. And that's all before considering the R&D costs of building AI datacenter hardware that can survive the orbital radiation environment.

[1] https://sunwatts.com/150-kw-solar-kits/

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-e...

[3] https://everydayastronaut.com/starlink-group-4-5-falcon-9-bl...