1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level
2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight alone not including running any higher heat producing component (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is a reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold in color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it.
3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a lot of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea GPGPUs on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that 30% have some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but "performs less good then it should/compared to other units" kind of broken.
4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck even if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your operations scale is large enough. In space things are magnitudes worse.
5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does every satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that relevant in the past, but might become a problem just for keeping stuff like Starlink running. We don't need to make it worse by putting datacenters into space.
6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity as a whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting things into space which don't need to go there.
Last but not least, wtf would you even want to do it?
There is zero benefit, non nada.
And yet journalists at major institutions have been repeating Musk's claims with very little skepticism ("xAI and SpaceX are merging to bring data centers to space").
https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
> Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.
Musk is running out of runway on his way to infinity dollars and since Tesla is slowly crumbling compared to its valuation, the ideas need to become crazier and crazier: humanoid robots tomorrow, self driving taxis tomorrow, reusable rockets going to Mars tomorrow, data centers in space tomorrow.
It would be fun to watch if Musk wouldn't funnel a lot of money that could be used for good, instead. Imagine how many diseases we could cure with all that money. Or feed and educate the poor. Or how much walkable and bikeable and ultimately liveable infrastructure we could build world wide. Or how fewer plastics we could use, ingest and discard if we could promote healthy and natural alternatives.
And techies fall for his stories every time, hook, line and sinker, because he's speaking about core geek fantasies.
It's a casino and the mirage of billionaire competency would vanish instantly if the media were even slightly skeptical.
The media is owned, it's a sham. It's a play.
> And techies fall for his stories every time, hook, line and sinker, because he's speaking about core geek fantasies.
Not all techies, but enough of them to keep the raft afloat.