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Feels like it would be cheaper and easier to put a data center on a platform/ship in international water than in space.

Also pretty sure there will always be empty land somewhere on earth where no one cares. It will always be easier to build and maintain even in a desert than in space.

People are radically overestimating the cost of space post-Starship. The sea is a terrible place to put inferencing chips!

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?