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Sorry I misspoke, you're totally correct. What I meant to say was it's only a problem if they're orbiting around the Earth. I've heard sun orbits mentioned as a possibility for data centers.

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It would still be a space junk problem. Space is big, but amazingly not that big. If you start ejecting little hot BBs at interplanetary speeds, you are creating broad swath of buckshot that will eventually impact something with the force of a missile. Put millions of these satellites into solar orbits (I’m ignoring the huge increase in launch cost this would require, and all the other issues like latency and comms), and you could very well make trips to other planets impossible.

It wouldn’t be Kessler syndrome as you would not have a chain reaction of collisions, but the end result would be the same.

Yeah if you leave enough junk in any orbit it'll become a problem, but I don't think that's necessarily an argument not to put things in that orbit. You'd just need to not hit that critical limit where things become untenable.

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