[thatjoeoverthr]

The analyses here miss the economic realities of building datacenters. "Just use land", "just use nuclear", "just use water". All of this is contested. A system of lawsuits and regulations turns negative externalities (even ones you aren't convinced of!) into costs you can weigh against. So, like hydrogen vs. RP-1, it's not enough to pick a handful of physical performance metrics. It has to win holistically.

If you can produce any kind of economically productive compute node and add it to (for example) the Starlink network, and launch on a reusable vehicle, you carry on installing them as fast as you can build them.

So, the move is to turn the problem of contested land use into a manufacturing problem.

This is not so easy to pin down on a spreadsheet, and will be decided at the level of the business unit. If SpaceX can put a GPU/TPU on the grid more economically than the other guy, then it doesn't matter if they have ammonia in the pipes instead of water.

Grab your popcorn.

[baq]

The article makes pretty much exactly this point somewhere in the middle.

> the list of organizations positioned to even try that is basically one.

Maaaaybe Blue Origin can join once they get a constellation going.