> and essentially reduce to a launch cost penalty.

Are you arguing that all this is technically possible or something? The whole point is that the costs would dwarf the gains.

> You are right that they can't be serviced, but that is missing the point of orbital data centers.

Pointing out a downside of something isn't ever "missing the point".

> The whole point is that you can build hundreds of thousands of these in a factory

In an Earth-based factory, right? Am I to understand that we can't build hundreds of thousands of regular Earth-based datacenters in a factory?

> and launch them in a scalable manner.

Wanna bet that launching something to space will always be a few orders of magnitude more expensive than shipping it somewhere across the planet?

> The power, cooling, etc. comes for "free".

Unlike on Earth, where you pay for sunshine? Or is cooling "free" in space but not on Earth? Lol?

> In the long run, as the cost of the chip, launches, etc. goes down, orbital data centers will scale better terrestrial ones.

The costs of the chips will get lower in space than on Earth?

The costs of launches will, again, become cheaper than terrestial transport?

> As a side note, I don't understand why I keep seeing these wrong arguments on HN repeatedly. Like everything mentioned in this thread can easily be fact checked. Radiative cooling is solved, launch costs are going down, so power costs will pay themselves back very quickly, etc.

The question isn't whether this is physically possible, but why you'd want to do it instead of an Earth-based datacenter. It's all downsides basically.