A million satellites, a 1.25 trillion dollar merger, chips mining Bitcoin in orbit - it reads like a message a spam account sends at 3am, except every line of it sits in FCC filings and earnings calls, which is the whole reason the file is open. The pitch is real enough: AI has run out of power on Earth, where grid, land and water are the binding constraints, and orbit offers near-endless sun and no cooling bill, so the money has moved. Starcloud already has an Nvidia chip running a real model up there, SpaceX has filed to launch up to a million data-centre satellites, and Google, Bezos and Eric Schmidt are all in.
Then there is the physics, which does not read press releases. You cannot cool anything in a vacuum by blowing air across it, so the waste heat has to be radiated away by panels the size of football pitches, and the sober estimates put orbital compute at three to ten times the cost per watt of the same rack on the ground. One chip in orbit is a demonstration, not an industry, and every honest version of the plan works only if Starship eventually flies often enough to crush launch costs sometime in the 2030s.
So the case stays open. Either this is where the world's compute goes to live, or it is a handful of very rich men talking themselves into a thermodynamics problem with a trillion dollars behind it, and it is worth noting that nearly everyone loudly insisting it cannot work owns a data centre on the ground. Verdict pending.