Starship has launched today and hasn't finished everything it needs to even proof that it works reliable. For a Datacenter you need to put it higher than low orbit.
After that, you will need to start to even develoop server racks full of GPUs for space. You literlay need to engineere from scratch a cooling system which will be a few hundred square feed big. You need to be able to transfer massive amount of energy reliable from a small GPU rack to all of this area.
Than you need to send a few thousand of these constalations up there. Every single micrometeroid, sun storm, broken component means loosing a whole rack immediadlty.
Then you need to actually verify that you can send up all of that infrastructure in space and keep it alive there.
Then you have to assume a certain amount of lifetime which will be a lot shorter than on earth and you can't sell it of. These resources are gone.
To all of this cost, you will have to add latency, data syncronisation between racks has to be complelty engineered from scratch too. We talk about 100 of gigabits between these small constelations.
In the same timespan with a lot less money, you could already build a normal datacenter somewhere on the aquator or just as south in texas as possible. You can service it, you can upgrade it, no issues.
all of these are already solved with starlink besides the high orbit. The real problem is power.
>you could already build a normal datacenter somewhere
Can you? from where i'm sitting it's pretty illegal to build a datacenter in the united states. There has literally been hundreds of projects to build data centers around the US that have gotten canceled due to NIMBY's. Collosus itself is plagued by lawsuits.
All those things you listed aren't deal breakers, and maybe some earth based compute will be used but we simply don't have enough power, political will or the legal system to be able to push these data centers through.
So despite the fact that it is theoretically "Cheaper" to build a ground based system, and it will take 261 starship launches just for a single GW... The math is still mathin'. $33B to make $180B.
After that, you will need to start to even develoop server racks full of GPUs for space. You literlay need to engineere from scratch a cooling system which will be a few hundred square feed big. You need to be able to transfer massive amount of energy reliable from a small GPU rack to all of this area.
Than you need to send a few thousand of these constalations up there. Every single micrometeroid, sun storm, broken component means loosing a whole rack immediadlty.
Then you need to actually verify that you can send up all of that infrastructure in space and keep it alive there.
Then you have to assume a certain amount of lifetime which will be a lot shorter than on earth and you can't sell it of. These resources are gone.
To all of this cost, you will have to add latency, data syncronisation between racks has to be complelty engineered from scratch too. We talk about 100 of gigabits between these small constelations.
In the same timespan with a lot less money, you could already build a normal datacenter somewhere on the aquator or just as south in texas as possible. You can service it, you can upgrade it, no issues.