We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon.
edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial percentage of the Sun's power. A few trillionths per year.
Think about it. Elon conjures up a vision of the future where we've managed to increase our solar cell manufacturing capacity by two whole orders of magnitude and have the space launch capability for all of it along with tons and tons of other stuff and the best he comes up with is...GPUs in orbit?
This is essentially the superhero gadget technology problem, where comic books and movies gloss over the the civilization changing implications of some technology the hero invents to punch bad guys harder. Don't get me wrong, the idea of orbiting data centers is kind of cool if we can pull it off. But being able to pull if off implies an ability to do a lot more interesting things. The problem is that this is both wildly overambitious and somehow incredibly myopic at the same time.
Datacenters in space are a TERRIBLE idea.
Figure out how to get rid of the waste heat and get back to me.
It's not so much a matter of whether it's an unsolvable problem but more like, how expensive is it to solve this problem, what are its limitations, and does the project still makes economic sense once you factor all that in?
How do the racks (or nodes) talk to eachother? Radios? Lasers?
What about the Kessler Syndrome?
Not a rocket scientist but 100% agree this sounds like a dead end.
I'd be curious where exactly they plan to put these datacenters... In low Earth orbit they would eventually reenter, which makes them a pollution source and you'd have no solar power half the time.
Parking them at the Earth-Sun L1 point would be better for solar power, but it would be more expensive to get stuff there.