SpaceX already blown through a number of "... but this cannot be!" forecasts. Would not discount them easily.
Prices for solar panels have dropped 90% in the last 10 years.
Price per kilo to Low Earth Orbit has dropped ~50% in the last 10 years.
SpaceX's entire plan is to keep dropping both of these prices down even more with massive solar panel / starship factories.
So, given that you're bought the GPUs, you could launch them into space, but you have the alternative option of ... not launching them into space.
If you just build in space no one will be able to hold up those permits.
For what it's worth I don't disagree with you.
This depends on ridiculously low costs to orbit. But there truly is unlimited power up there from the sun.
Regulations or not, building a terrestrial network is expensive. Once all the permits are granted, it still costs on the order of $5/foot ($25k/mile) to buy and install fiber. (Cost varies with labor costs and by installation type, obviously.) And you need backhaul, multiplexers or switches, etc.
In a fairly dense area with a lot of customers and proximity to existing transit providers, fiber is very cost effective. In a rural area with long last-mile links and few customers, fiber is more expensive and satellite can win.
Starlink has another potential issue in dense areas: limited bandwidth. The beams from satellites that are near each other can interfere with each other, so doubling the number of satellites may not double the aggregate bandwidth available in a given small, densely populated area. In contrast, fiber scales better than linearly up to huge bandwidth: installing 10 strands of fiber is much less than twice as expensive as installing five strands, and the bandwidth available per single-mode strand has been increasing over time without any requirement to use fancier fiber.
And if solar panels drop another 90%, why not just slap them on earth?
Because you need batteries then.
Oh, sure, both kinds of factories are legitimately slashable as they are totally the same thing. Pretty much. Right? :-(
The AI1 Satellite that SpaceX has shown, is basically one rack. Something like 72 GPUs. Elon himself said it was a "rack in space" more than a datacenter in space. Sure I guess you could launch 100,000 of them and call it a datacenter. But their own graphic shows this thing to be 2 to 2 1/2 tons. So who is gonna spend $200,000 to launch a single rack into space? Get the panels as cheap as you want, the launch cost is still pretty massive just to get 150kw of free power.
I mean maybe my napkin math is way wrong here, but I don't see what the cost savings is.
They definitely haven't hit all of their goals, but I don't think anything they want to do is impossible, just really difficult.
-Elon
Erm, ESA thought it was a dream:
"Twenty years ago, before SpaceX had launched a single rocket, Richard Bowles, a sales director of the European Arianespace launch consortium, said SpaceX’s ambition to launch, recover and reuse rockets, cutting the price of launches in half, was a dream.
‘SpaceX primarily sems to be selling a dream. Which is good, we should all dream,’ he said. ‘I think reusability is a dream… How am I going to respond to a dream?… First of all you don’t wake people up. They have to wake up on their own… They’re not supermen. Whatever they can do, we can do.’"
https://spectator.com/article/spacex-has-put-europe-to-shame...