Let's be honest. The only reason orbital data centers are a talking point at all is to justify the stratospheric SpaceX valuation for the IPO. There's literally no other reason.

Everybody who knows anything about data centers understands this. You don't even need to get into the thermodynamics of cooling where the only option is radiating away heat. Terrestial data centers have to use water cooling because the heat generation is so significant.

The real problem is failure. When you have a lot of servers, things fail all the time. Hard drives, SSDs, RAM chips, GPUs, motherboard, etc. Servers are designed to be able to quickly replace parts. If your data center is in orbit, these parts will just fail and there is no repair. There's certainly no economic repair.

If I remember my numbers rightly, at a company like Amazon or Google, the ratio is (IIRC) 1 FTE per 10,000 servers, meaning if you have 10,000 servers, 1 FTE will spend their entire time just replacing parts. A good hardware tech will have a pool of known good parts. When a server detects a fault, they'll go and replace probably everything with known good parts and then figure out what's wrong later. In GPU heavy DCs I suspect 1 FTE can cover fewer than that just because the heat management is much more complicated.

I really can't believe we're still talking about this. It borders on journalistic malpractice to even suggest this is a realistic possibility.

I mean, I think it's cool and a "good idea" in terms of getting off this rock and out into the black.

We can do it, we just have to decide we want to. If we're going to have a Tulip Mania Redux I'd rather have it with space data centers and reusable rockets and autonomous human-level AI moonshots/boondoggles than... I don't know, literal tulips, or factoring large numbers to mine bitcoin or whatever...