zlacker

It makes sense if you want low-latency compute accessible to other things in space making use of it: Pharmaceutical research, manufacturing. These are large, non speculative areas of likely growth in the space industry. Manufacturing especially will require lots of inference compute with the AI systems currently under development for industrial robotics.

If you're looking at this and saying "Lol, no, we don't need data centers in space just to power more GPT sycophancy and some health insurance company's RAG workflows." Then you're right, so just move on from that usage and consider the things we'd like to do in space, and especially the things we're already doing but want to do more of.

I know, my gut was telling me this is ridiculous, premature at best even through the lens of expanding space industry. But then with respect to the need for data centers-- had I even thought about it a year ago, my gut would have laughed if someone had said "Buy Wester Digital, HDD's are a growth stock".