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by toomuchtodo·12d ago·view on hn ↗
"You can play around with the cost sliders to estimate the economics, but even being quite optimistic, space data centers cost ~2-3x of their terrestrial counterparts."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48491425

The idea is marketing for the stock price and enterprise value. If SpaceX does do it, it'll be analogous to Tesla's "Supervised Full Self Driving." "We run a Kubernetes cluster with some models on the satellites."

https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters

If you see a datacenter in orbit, it means something went wrong on Earth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48935384 - July 2026 (0 comments)

The Space Data Centers Situation is Insane [video] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qpdUNMt2yg - June 27th, 2026

Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48490094 - June 2026 (107 comments)

(reply to your deleted share link from Claude: please don't reply with AI slop)

1 comments
> space data centers cost ~2-3x of their terrestrial counterparts

Which is very cheap if it means they can launch it quickly instead of being in permit hell for a year. You can also avoid sabotage (including via lawfare) and dishonest TV reporting à la "I'm standing here in front Big Bad Evil Datacenter that the local community says causes cancer and bad hair".

They also get lower latency to pretty much everybody except the neighbours of such a terrestrial data center.

The latter is an honest advantage. The former is a way of routing around damage. Both can be very valuable.