Why not build the data center for general use in space as well? The companies that build data center certainly have enough resources to pull off something like this. What's stopping them?
For most regular datacenters, you want to run servers, and so you want low latency (proximity), sometimes high bandwidth, and reliability. Neither are really a factor for AI training.
Say you have a datacenter which is offline for 15 seconds every 30 minutes, which only does gigabits per second with 100ms+ latencies. What else can you do with that? For training AI though, these are just fine.
So, training AI is a type of compute that would benefit from space, especially for that legal constraint. (Not sure how they will cool the datacenter though)
I imagine if you run the multiple ground stations needed to maintain a data connection to an orbit that has 24/7 solar, those ground stations will be required to follow the jurisdiction of the (different) countries they are located at. Congrats you just multiplied your legal costs.
Why do so many ideas nowadays radiate the energy of edgy weed smoking teenagers trying to game the system with half-baked ideas? Did Elon make this popular?