RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/116283829304595946

This is asking the wrong question. Here are the two problems they're claiming to solve:

1. Continuous power availability
2. NIMBYism

Both can be solved much more cheaply by putting a data center on a derrick in the ocean, where there's a continuous current. Submarine turbines would power the equipment. Convective cooling would be trivial to implement. Network latency would be very low if fiber is run to the nearest terrestrial hub.

No significant technological innovation is needed. Transporting equipment and people would be orders of magnitude less expensive. The atmosphere wouldn't be polluted by a constant rain of obsolete equipment.

In other words, even if all of the existing barriers to satellite data centers were solved, they still wouldn't make more sense than putting them on the surface of the ocean.

Whether we should have *those* is an open question, but I can't imagine arguing that the satellites would be a better solution.