> power is continuous and free via solar array

It’s is on earth as well using solar and batteries. What is likely to get cheaper faster? Solar and batteries? Or lifting datacenters to space? The world is almost at the point of deploying 1TW/year of solar, and batteries are catching up. No space required. There aren't a lot of VC investment opportunities speeding the rate of solar and battery deployments though.

The argument probably is that battery advances require not yet existing tech via new chemistry etc while what they are proposing is basically just integrating tech that already exists

But this is not the case, as it relates to the battery manufacturing pipeline and capacity. Battery supply exceeds battery demand.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43624308

Just spitballing here, but what if you built it on Earth, and then used the savings to build a second one on the opposite side of Earth? Now you have equivalently continuous power via solar array and also, as a bonus, air.

Not continuous because weather is a thing. Also the sun isnt directly overhead the entire time so need a much larger array

Okay, build 12 datacenters, 30 degrees of longitude apart. I'm pretty sure it's still far cheaper.

Well I guess it's a good thing for them they actually did the math. Please show me where they sell you electricity at ~$0.002/kWh where it's politically stable enough to build super expensive datacenters.

Free in the sense of astronomical capital and operational costs.

r&d sure, not sure about ops as you can probably just detach a faulty module and launch a replacement.

Not an expert in this area, but I think that that "just" is hiding a lot of complexity. Plus you also need some remotely operated robots to mount the replacement.

Stationkeeping is not free, satellite monitoring is not free, and any replacement to any component is now a multi-year, at least 1+ million dollar affair (or most likely a complete replacement, since not many satellites have done in-situ repairs).

Relaunching is effectively operational cost.

Power in needs to equal heat out, and that isn't easy in space. They, deceptively, claim that their novel solution is radiative cooling. Relying on radiation for cooling in space is the problem statement! Convective (as on Earth) is significantly more effective.

I'm not one of those idiots who would claim that "we should focus on terrestrial problems instead of space," but this idea seems to have only downsides.

> “We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology… there’s no way to get there without a breakthrough… we need fusion or we need radically cheaper solar plus storage or something” -Sam Altman

It's kind of depressing that the only way to make this tech better is to feed it more energy. (And apparently now to send it to space)

It's also interesting that everyone is convinced the same capabilities can't be realized with drastically less compute.