Comment by DoctorOetker

I just get tripped up when I see people disbelieve physics, especially laws that have been known for about 150 years!

The economics and energy balance is where I too am very skeptical, at least near term.

Quick back of envelope calculations gave me a payback time of about 10 years, so which is only a single order of magnitude off which can easily accumulate by lack of access to detailed plans.

I can not exclude they see something (or can charge themselves lower launch costs, etc.) that makes it entirely feasible, but also can't confirm its infeasible economically. For example I have no insight of what fraction of terrestrial datacenter establishment cost goes into various "frictions" like paying goverments and lawyers to gloss over all the details, paying permission taxes etc. I can see how space can become attractive in other ways.

Then again if you look at the energetic cost to do a training run, it seems MW facilities would suffice. So why do we read all the noise about restarting nuclear power plants or trying to secure new power plants strictly for AI? It certainly could make sense if governments are willing to throw top dollar at searching algorithmic / mathematical breakthroughs in cryptography. Even if the compute is overpriced, you could have a lot of LLM's reasoning in space to find the breakthroughs before strategic competitors do. Its a math and logic race unfolding before our eyes, and its getting next to no coverage.