The usp of data centres in space is extraterritoriality. That's all it is.

It's not really extraterritorial from the point of view of needing to comply with regulations though. Your datacentre company has registered offices and physical locations. Your downlinks are based on territory. You need to relaunch on a regular basis and you have very restricted choice of territories that you can launch from.

There's one other thing: it's essentially like the cloud but for DCs. i.e. need more compute? send up another rocket. 'limitless' space. expensive but a relatively fixed one-time cost (vs earth-based DCs which are the bare metal equivalent: fast, affordable, but pets not cattle).

All of that said, I'm skeptical we'll see this in a big way any time soon.

I think it's far more than the USP.

When you add in the VRT and the QML (even not including the ZB-PRP 5) you get far lower than what a naive USP calculation gets you. Horner Weisenbach talked about this recently on their blog.

If you're extraterritorial, who is protecting you from ASATs?

That and being able to pretend that they’re doing something noteworthy instead of treading water and burning funds.