Businesses run anywhere real money can be made. Middle east is the most volatile place. Yet, the businesses are perfectly okay building infrastructure to extract, refine and ship oil from there.

If real money can be made, there is no need of datacenters in space. Offer some country some money and they'll let you build whatever you want. The whole idea is entirely unprofitable thats why they are making up things that won't work economically. Keep giving us money indefinitely, we'll keep spending, money can be made after a few decades of spending ... trust us.

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throwaway473825 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Note that you didn't mention any such country, and for good reason - there is none.

You'd need a dictatorship where people's voices don't matter, but then there's no right of ownership either.

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thelastgallon 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Note that you didn't mention any such country, and for good reason - there is none.

All flavors of Govt (authoritarian/democratic) are bending over backwards to build new DCs.

In Ulanqab, China buildout of data centers 1000x size of Colossus: https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2099319829589295197

India, a country which has neither power nor water or any measurable infrastructure is giving massive subsidies to hyperscalers to build AI DCs. They get free land (very very costly), nearly free energy, guaranteed supply of water and so on ...

Examples of one authoritarian govt and one democratic govt. And there are 180+ other countries.

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thelastgallon an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> You'd need a dictatorship where people's voices don't matter, but then there's no right of ownership either.

And there are plenty of those countries. As well as countries that aren't dictatorships. Every leader everywhere is available for sale. In democracies, usually for a small sum. Dictatorships ask for a percentage of profit.

Everyone knows how the current administration got to power: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/01/politics/elon-musk-2024-e...

Trump will gladly allow datacenters to be built on federal lands. Just like he allows Oil/Coal and bans Wind and Solar. The only reason there is new story of Space Datacenters is because even if they are given everything by the Govt, it simply won't work.

If you see a datacenter in orbit, it means something went wrong on Earth: https://systemsthinkingcollection.substack.com/p/space-datac...

People believe all kinds of fiction and garbage, like going to Mars. (Why Terraform Mars When We Can Fix The Earth? https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8mhib97--n4)

The same argument holds for AI DCs. If you can build profitable AI datacenters in space, why can't you build profitable AI datacenters on Earth? The only reason is you can't build profitable AI datacenters on earth. Just give us a few more trillions and wait a decade or two, we promise ...

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jazzyjackson an hour ago | parent [-]

This idea that space is a way to get out of the reach of NIMBYs is so dumb.

a: now you’re in everyone’s back yard, since satellites in orbit can be seen by the naked eye at twilight zipping across the sky, so now the whole earth hates you

b: you are still launching from earth, which is a pretty significant target if you’re worried about ecoterrorism.

	▲	joquarky 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'm curious why a space data center has to orbit Earth. Why not a solar orbit? Batched work can be done anywhere if you can tolerate the latency.

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ericd 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The real point is power limitations, putting stuff in space in the right orbit lets you turn solar power into reliable base load.

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thelastgallon an hour ago | parent [-]

Why stop somewhere in between? You can go straight to the Sun and directly tap into near infinite source of energy. No need of solar panels, direct access to thermonuclear energy, too cheap to meter. The economics already works out, zero capex, zero opex for the next ~4 billion years. Just needs a few small problems to be worked out, like a pipe to transfer energy.

	▲	ericd 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I guess we'll see if their idea warrants your ludicrous comparison soon. Google is putting out a lot of real resources to test theirs out, so presumably it wasn't obviously insane to them when they ran the numbers.