Yeah sure the technical problems are solvable if you throw money at them. I'm sure we could have had a colony on Mars by this point as well if NASA/etc. continuously spent insane massive amounts of money on every year since the 70s.

So what?

Why on earth would you want an AI datacenter in space? Like what would you gain by doing that at an absurdly higher cost than you could build on them earth?

"Free" energy? lol.. just build nuclear powerplants or loads of solar, wind and batteries on earth. Its still going to be cheaper...

> How is anyone going to compete with that? There are a bunch of data-center-in-space startups

A better question is why would anyone even try?

> are mostly leasing their data centers from someone else

It's really not. Building your own datacentres is very expensive and more importantly takes a lot of time. They need compute now, so it makes perfect sense to rent it from failing AI companies like xAI which bought a lot of chips but don't have anything to do with them since their models are just not very good.

> But if SpaceX has the cheapest data center with the most capacity, they will be able to extract profits

Well.. that would be a first one, since no similar industry works that way. Compute is a commodity so unless your literally run out of space on earth to build datacenters or Nvidia/etc. stop selling to anyone but SpaceX that can't really happen, can it?

You just said that "building your own datacentres is very expensive and more importantly takes a lot of time."

I agree. If building data centers in space is cheaper and takes less time, then that's a win and a clear reason to do it.

Costs for terrestrial data centers keep going up and costs for space tech keep going down. At some point, they will intersect.