Orbital data centers, part 1: There’s no way this is economically viable, right?

Ars Technica begins a three-part series examining whether orbital data centers—replicas of terrestrial server farms built on satellite buses in space—are economically viable. While Starcloud has already launched an Nvidia H100 GPU into orbit running Gemini, replicating even one large data center would require hundreds of satellites, and historically space construction costs have been extraordinarily high despite recent reductions in launch costs.