The world is a very, very large place and I have a hard time imagining space would be an easier place to do anything. Nobody wants to live near petrochemical factories or aluminum smelters, either, but we’ve got lots of petrochemicals and aluminum. SV execs shredded any chance of cheap public cooperation by presenting like cartoonishly evil, patronizing, greedy big corporate bad guys from some shitty legal dramedy. They need to learn from their mistakes, develop some humility, and approach people with a serious financial proposition, like the oil industry in Alaska. That’s not as cheap as it could have been if they didn’t start out acting like scaled-up shady local real estate developers trying to build condos on protected wetlands, but it will absolutely be a lot cheaper than space.

> FWIW, given how many places in the U.S. are passing datacenter bans

If you have the technical chops to set up a data center in space — with no connections to the electrical grid or municipal water, you can use your technology to build your data center with the same specs right here on earth in 90% of places that you think are issuing "bans". You'll also get much better cooling for free via convection.

A remote town with a population of 43 will be happy for a data center to employ 2 locals, but data center operators aren't doing that today because they want tax breaks tiny towns can't give, infrastructure tiny towns don't have, nevermind a well-armed police force to deter would-be GPU thieves. Space is a red herring.

I think the data centers would get a lot less push back if they were built using new solar and/or wind power in places that have abundant water, and maybe further away from residential areas. Yes that is more expensive than what they are doing now, but it is still almost certainly cheaper than building in space. Heck, putting data centers in the ocean is probably cheaper than space.

It’s still cheaper to build in a completely undeveloped desert with no neighbors and costly utility hookups than space. By orders of magnitude. That gap will never be materially close.

Space datacenters are just SDI2, a convenient bullshit to be able to funnel more money to campaign donors.

As long as there’s space on earth, Space Datacenters can never be economical. It’s rally that simple.

I don't support data center bans but even if that happens in the US I'm pretty sure some other countries will welcome them. For AI inference workloads the network latency doesn't matter.

Nah, they'll just bite the bullet and build the data centers in remote Canada or Finland or somewhere else no one's complaining (ignore Greta as per usual) and tap into the local hydropower resources. Might take a tad longer and cost slightly more money than in [quasi-lawless US state], but other than that, no problem. Aluminium smelters (basically a solid form of electricity export) in Quebec and Siberia have been doing that for decades already (like 20GW private-ish hydropower).

Feels like it would be cheaper and easier to put a data center on a platform/ship in international water than in space.

Also pretty sure there will always be empty land somewhere on earth where no one cares. It will always be easier to build and maintain even in a desert than in space.

If cities are banning datacenters, we can

a. put them a few miles outside urban centers

b. put them in space

Which is a cheaper, better option?

You aren’t necessarily wrong but thats a dumb reason for space data centers to be good ideas.

This is a ridiculous take. The reason that "people" are floating the idea of placing datacenter in space - despite the MASSIVE downsides present (cooling, maintenence, latency, availability, cost, etc.) is because you can't firebomb a datacenter thats in space as easily as you can one thats in your suburb. The regulatory friction behind a datacenter buildout is a low concern, and something that is "affordable" for hyperscalers and billionaires. Buying someones farm and building a private powerplant is small potatoes. But being terrestrial, angry people can show up and destroy it if they feel so inclined. It's much, much harder for angry plebs to launch something into orbit and then hit a moving target.

You could probably see some of those bans reversed. You just need to have companies go into communities and act like they're a multi-trillion-dollar company instead of begging for tax abatements and shoving off the cost of the infrastructure on the people who feel like they might lose their jobs from AI.

they are not gonna law itself back to stone age by making data centers illegal, it's just too much money, security implications to chain yourself up just because a few politicians wants a few votes and "enviromentalists" demands it. Don't forget there are people that are ok with data centers.

I don't really understand this perspective. The margins for data centers are such that they could pay massive subsidies to state and local governments and put them in the middle of nowhere with BTM power, and almost all that opposition would evaporate overnight. And you'd still come out way ahead of space-based DCs. They're not doing this yet because they don't have to.