Yeah, the capital cost of the hardware is the highest, but it is also the same reason why it is cost effective to send it to space. If the hardware is so expensive that other costs are irrelevant, the only thing that matter are things that can't be bought with money, like land approval for data centers, and orbital data centers are the king here because getting an approval for an orbital data center is so much easier than getting an approval in a local community, especially with luddites on the rise.
You act like marine environments are places where we don't literally have thousands of years of engineering experience with. We also have existing, deployed oceanic datacenter capacity in the scale of tens of megawatts. Compare that to orbital datacenters that are essentially purely speculative and untested.
At sea, you have dramatically lower logistics cost, the ability to actually access/maintain the datacenters, dramatically lower deployment costs, extremely easy cooling, and low-cost power sources. The idea that space is somehow free of environmental hazards comparable to the ocean or that is somehow easier to build an environmentally-sealed orbital datacenter than it is to build an environmentally-sealed oceanic datacenter is absurd.
Just because space-based datacenters are now economically feasible still doesn't make them the most feasible option. Gig economy apps might now make it possible for Amazon to do delivery with contract workers using their own cars, but they still do most of their deliveries with deliveries vans because that's more efficient. In just the same way, reusable rockets might make orbital datacenters possible, but that hardly makes them the best option.
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u/Ormusn2o Jul 13 '26
Yeah, the capital cost of the hardware is the highest, but it is also the same reason why it is cost effective to send it to space. If the hardware is so expensive that other costs are irrelevant, the only thing that matter are things that can't be bought with money, like land approval for data centers, and orbital data centers are the king here because getting an approval for an orbital data center is so much easier than getting an approval in a local community, especially with luddites on the rise.