You still need a round trip to space and back - which with a Starlink-like orbit means a distance of at least 400km. At that point it makes significantly more sense to place your "edge computing AI engine" at a 5G base station a few dozen km away.
Sure, in the same way that there is unlimited solar power on earth.
There are orbits with 24/7 or near-24/7 sunlight - but those are very undesirable if you want a low-latency data link back to Earth. Just like you can get 24/7 sunlight on the North / South Pole - but they are still pretty bad locations for a data center.
LEO orbits like those used by Starlink have far better connectivity, but about the same sunlight exposure as the surface as the planet will be between you and the sun about half the time.
Also, power is the easy part. Cooling is far harder.
military/industrial customers want this for tactical operations
fully discreet low latency compute that integrates with there existing space hardware
so the ability to run drones, and meatbots from space, with low hardware requirements on the ground, but with lets say 1000~2000 users max, power users, but not that many.
so batteries, heat sinks,he refrigeration radiators, on a sattelite fleet.
they have been trialing this for years and are pitching putting ALL of the military compute in space, no more dirty civilian hands on there toys
Looks like Macrohard. Obsoletes 20 thousand unproductive roles stalling advancing technology. For example, propulsive space capsule land landing is doable. But you see a 5 decade gap between the Apollo and Orion sea surface splashdown.
Wars of choice are about getting paid enormous amounts to the owners of The Economist. The latest iteration has $5 billion installations wiped out by $7 thousand drone shots over weeks.
It's edge computing. Obsoletes the round trip for ground based AI crunch and power draw, cooling.
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