I need to understand what possible benefit there is to doing DCs in space. The cost would be, no pun intended, fucking astronomical. The cooling situation would make no sense at all -- the major up-and-coming application of DCs, LLM training, has absurd cooling requirements even here on earth where convective cooling is an option, to the point where many DCs use open-loop cooling. Latency might be better, in some cases, I guess, but probably not by some groundbreaking amount.

Who is this product for? How the hell did "data centres in space" make it into the prospectus at all?

More to the point, why is Morningstar being so generous with their interpretation of that line of business? It's plainly insane, and you don't need an advanced degree in physics to understand why.

It's easy to see the benefit in DC's in space if you look at a few ingredients:

1. The recent Iran drone attacks on AWS data centers

2. Growing anti-AI and anti data center sentiment at home, plus Larry Fink (ceo of Blackrock) in a recent interview being terrified of dissident groups using consumer drones to attack data centers.

3. Anthropic, Grok, and other AI vendors becoming more and more integrated into defense and military, plus increasingly reliance on AI for other national surveillance systems

Data centers are and will be targets, both for national military attacks as well as home grown dissident attacks, so they are proposing to move some of the critical workloads to somewhere that the only group that can attack the data center hosting the workload is a nation state with space launch capabilities. That significantly reduces the number of actors that can attack the data center. And if the US wants to they can probably bomb all the other space rocket launch facilities worldwide in less than 24 hours, leaving extremely limited capability to attack a space hosted DC.

Is it insane? Probably, but the US has done insane things with military budget before, and will continue to do so for a long time. If you are Elon, its a great time to milk that US defense budget for some more R&D, and even if the main project doesn't work out, he's still going to be able to keep some innovations within the company and apply them to Starlink and other more realistic endeavors.

> Who is this product for?

1. Using one part of Musk's holdings to trick people into feeling optimistic about how it will do incest with another part.

2. Megalomania dreams of becoming the Tessier-Ashpools from Neuromancer with their private fiefdom.

There is no benefit, and they aren't going to actually do it in any meaningful way. When was the last time Elon Musk made a factual forward looking statement about one of his companies or products? It's all just bullshit, no need to dig deeper than that.

It's so you don't have to ask anybody for permission. That's it.

Right now, 70% of the country is at least skeptical of DCs and at worst absolutely hate them. NIMBY is basically the rallying cry. That's why you go "up" (if they can make starship work). The physics is "hard" but doable, you can keep them cool enough in a sun synchronous orbit. The math pencils out. It's not my field, but back of the envelope math seems to work. Scott Manley has a video on it if you're skeptical.

But, people keep thinking about this like "return on investment" is the only thing driving this play. They're literally the only company with a mostly reusable system (unless you count that company trying in China?). They're the closest company to a fully reusable launch vehicle. They have a ton of government contracts with star shield. After Bezos' rocket blew up last week, there's basically nobody close to competing with starlink...

I am not a Musk fanboy, but, like, there is literally no other serious space competitor right now. I mean, "maybe" Boeing? But not really - they're years away...

So, like if you read about the Memphis Datacenter - Colossus I think? They're unable to get power, they're pulling in power from Mississippi to keep the thing running. You know how many times they have to ask permission for that? The infrastructure costs there just to power it start to get absurd too. Then the unending line of approvals and environmental impact studies and permits. For all the people saying, "it'd be cheaper on earth" it might be in terms of dollars, but if you can basically iterate entirely unfettered in space, it's the obvious choice if you can make it happen.

Like, seriously, go try to build something, there are a LOT of rules outside of rural areas. It's literally why my wife and I decided to build our cabin where we are building, because there were basically no restrictions. Meanwhile in town, my buddy's deck was a nightmare to permit... it was a deck, not bridge. Seriously, to all the people saying, "it's easier" go try to get something built in a big city or where you have to fight through permit hell.

These tech oligarch guys view this (I think rightly - it's one of the only things I view them as right on) as a race to AGI against the Chinese. We're in the lead right now, cool, but the Chinese have excess kilowatts and we don't. In fact, we don't have adequate power plant infrastructure at all and we couldn't get the power plants built if we wanted to (the Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson book Abundance touches on this topic if you're curious as to why). It's not going to happen.

But up? No NIMBYs in space (yet). So they're going to go where nobody will tell them "no." At least, that's what I would do if I owned a literal rocket company.

People are all looking at this stuff through the lens of "money" as if that matters hardly at all after AGI, lol. The analysts are looking at this like it's 1995. I mean, PE ratios are important, don't get me wrong, but after 2016, and Trump, and the applications of transformers, and the war in Ukraine (and current shit show in Iran), and the rising price of fuel, and, well I'll stop, the list goes on and on, but acting like the "normal" rules of investment apply is just silly. This stuff is about power, and he who controls access to orbit is worth a basically unlimited amount of money...

Do I wish it was happening differently? Yup. But hey, we decided to give up on space as a country like 50 years ago, maybe we can try to do cool stuff in space now.