Comment by tessierashpool
5 hours ago
there are two arguments for it.
one is marketing.
the other is that you could make tiny datacenters and flood the sky with them. in effect, not datacenters at all, but some kind of dataswarm coordinating at literal lightspeed via lasers.
they'd still be wildly expensive to deploy, and probably litter the orbit zone with fast-moving debris.
Your "other" makes no sense. It doesn't matter if you make a few big or a lot smaller, in space you will still need the same space for the same amount of megawatt. Or did you miss the scale of parent's post ? Because in that dream scenario of "let's ignore all the issues except that" and "the earth and the sun don't have any impact", it's still 3 THOUSANDS square meters for a MW of 8 racks.
You want to go smaller and go one rack only sure, it's still hundreds of square meters. Check the size of current orbital structure for a point of reference, you can't dwarf those and call it a "dataswarm of tiny datacenters flooding the sky".