It is absolutely baffling to me how frequently I hear people talk about this around me. There is no way this is happening anytime in the near future.
You don't have to actually have an orbiting datacenter for the idea to work. You just have to convince enough people. Once you've done that, you can claim that regional regulations don't apply to your data because the data is in orbit. Its not like somebody is gonna go up there and catch you in the lie.
Out-of-regulatory-reach is what they'll actually be selling. It can be on earth, it just has to be sufficiently hidden such that you can claim that it's in space.
But if the US isn’t the first to put an AI on the moon, we’ll lose the AI space race!