>Why not build off-grid?

He sort of is. I believe people aren't very happy with his gas turbines powering Colossus near Memphis. There's also currently a >5 year backlog for nat gas turbines for combined cycle plants.

Solar takes up an enormous amount of space to get to reasonable base load, because you have to massively overpanel in order to carry it through winter. You need a large multiple of the panels you'd need in space to get to reliable baseload, plus batteries. During grey winter weeks, our home array is frequently making like 1/6 what it does during summer, and even summer days have night/weather/etc compared to sun sync orbits.

Nuclear is hilariously expensive and slow to build. But I have some hope for small reactors and Commonwealth Fusion Systems/Helion.

>What about the other 94% of the Earth's landmass?

Geopolitical concerns, infrastructure/power availability, security, since these things are full of incredibly valuable hardware.

> Geopolitical concerns, infrastructure/power availability, security, since these things are full of incredibly valuable hardware.

The market decides that, not Elon. Do customers want to pay $X for compute in Iceland (or wherever), or do they want to pay $kX for compute in space?

What premium are customers willing to pay for compute in space? I would guess that the premium is actually negative because the quality of computation in space is worse than under the sweet embrace of Earth's atmosphere which provides a natural protection against radiation.