Did they though? From what I’ve read the places where they build get lots of money and infrastructure (not only DC-related) from them.

- America. Much harder since the elections. Not appealing.

- Europe. Doesn't have enough electricity with anti-AI, anti-big tech and high tax governments. Not appealing.

- Latin America. Expensive, likely to have your assets appropriated by socialists. Not appealing.

- Africa. No.

- Middle East. Your GPU cluster might get blown up. No.

- China. To some extent yes. Plenty of power and space, pro-AI government, but many companies don't want to send their IP to a country famous for copying it and they're still under GPU sanctions.

- Japan, Korea, etc. Maybe. They're not really famous for big datacenters though.

- Australia, Canada. Possible, but you're exposed to Europe-style political risks.

There just aren't many places on Earth where it's realistic to build and operate AI datacenters once political issues and grid constraints are taken into account.

Remote towns with populations of 43 are exactly the sorts of places that are pushing back on having datacenters in their areas.

And space is the ultimate physical protection. In reality a bigger issue than GPU thefts are protests or leftist groups trying to firebomb you. See the problems the Tesla factory in Germany has had with leftist violence, like setting its electricity pylons on fire (because electric cars "consume natural resources and are not sustainable", lol). The left has become very anti-AI and so the risk of attacks on facilities, especially if built outside the USA, is quite high which in turn means you have to overbuild physical security like high fences.

Whether they can be worth the money it cost to put them in orbit is another story.

Data centers in brownfields and urban environments see near-zero resistance. There are data centers in skyscrapers in the center of most major U.S. cities, and nobody cares.

Stop plowing down the forests, slurping up the aquifers, and digging up the prairies, and people will stop complaining.

A recent law also gave data centers the last priority for grid access. The idea was to prioritize productive industry over less productive uses of electricity. Even something with as little added value as steel production tends to employ ~10 people (directly or as subcontractors) and produce ~€10 million/year of exports for every MW of average power consumption.

1. Everything rusts.

2. There is no permanent power source, unlike in sun synchronous orbit where you have 24/7 daylight.

3. The US has no ship building industry of any size.

4. Storms can destroy things.

There is no empty space on Earth unclaimed by governments. Given the results of the American midterms essentially all land is currently controlled by left wing governments, and the left is very anti-AI. Only China really wants to build AI at scale but they don't have enough chips yet. That might change, but even then not many companies want to upload all their IP to China.

So you can forget building more or less any large industrial projects on Earth for the foreseeable future. It may not matter. There appears to be a GPU glut starting anyway, so who knows if anyone will even need new datacenters for a while?

Not that anything is really produced in space either, more like passively transformed into some crystal form from a liquid state or whatever. Environmental assistance more than anything else.

Thanks for the correction!