Comment by aftbit

Some of it might come from True Names by Vernor Vinge too, where the cheapest place to buy bulk compute is giant satellites orbiting on geosync orbit. This became possible because they were developed early on for communications, then obsoleted by Starlink-like LEO constellations, so they have a ton of spare undesirable high-latency capacity to sell. In this fictional world, ground-based fiber optic networks never happened, at least not at the kind of scale they did in the real world.

But because that's fiction, Vinge can just handwave away all the hard engineering problems for sci-fi flavor.