What they are trying to do is an a very ambitious engineering challenge in several highly integrated domains, from spaceships to robotics, gpu, server design , ai. Typical stakes are high margins are high.
Project also pushes boundaries of what human can do the same way starlink did. 20 years ago starlink scale was also an "impossible" thing. Is it possible now to push one gpu and serve it from space? Yes, can you do it at scale? Big question.
Obstacles :
Price per kg to orbit. They aim to go from $150 to $10 per kg. Can they deliver? Big question, but having something that demands so many starship, like GPU heavy tasks, will help them achieve this goal. Benefits? No rent, no cooling issues, cheap sun-powered electricity 24 hours a day, unlike anywhere else on Earth.
Jurisdiction. Servers can't be shut down or taken away by police, etc.
Cooling. Yes, it's a vacuum, but with $10 per kg, you can deliver pipes and coolant, and since you don't have space constraints, you can build these pipes with a robot, making that datacenter extremely cheap.
3. Labor. If a robot can do primitive tasks combined with design that is fully remote, you labor costs goes almost to 0.
the output: with $10 per pg, delivering solar panels, coolant + robot for some urgent fixes. Robots even with current technology can swap a harddrive for example, especially if hardware is built to be mantained by robots not human. You don't need large construction, you invest into design, that once assembled , cost you maybe comparable amount of hardware to deliver. After that it runs for free!
The economy if this obviously beating anything exised on earth.
Total pipe dream. They can't take away your servers, but they can imprison you until you provide access. And SpaceX would still fall under the laws of whichever country it's based in. If lawful access is really a problem, laws will be written to make it SpaceX's problem. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/
What if your server fly over france , but not in France, hence: you don't need to build servers in france, unlike before, you don't need to deal with local government on so many issues, water, electricity etc to be local in france.
And , taxes : crypto payments + compute , and same transaction in france doesn't have to be taxed anymore :)
Yes, you have to pay taxes to US government, but not to france.