alt Hacker News> 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.
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If all the energy for a space appliance comes from the sun, in steady state they only have to radiate away the same amount that hits them. All long-lived spacecraft manage it.
Whether they can be worth the money it cost to put them in orbit is another story.
It's not a technical problem. It's a people problem. Every data center project over the last year has experienced some form of pushback no matter where they're built
Not really. In sun synchronous orbit you can use solar power without battery backup. You can't do that on Earth because of night time.
Remote towns with populations of 43 are exactly the sorts of places that are pushing back on having datacenters in their areas.
And space is the ultimate physical protection. In reality a bigger issue than GPU thefts are protests or leftist groups trying to firebomb you. See the problems the Tesla factory in Germany has had with leftist violence, like setting its electricity pylons on fire (because electric cars "consume natural resources and are not sustainable", lol). The left has become very anti-AI and so the risk of attacks on facilities, especially if built outside the USA, is quite high which in turn means you have to overbuild physical security like high fences.