Communication is a well-understood problem, and SpaceX already has Starlink. They might need pretty high bandwidth, but that's not necessarily much of a problem in space. Latency could be a problem, except that AI training isn't the sort of problem where you care about latency.

I'd be curious where exactly they plan to put these datacenters... In low Earth orbit they would eventually reenter, which makes them a pollution source and you'd have no solar power half the time.

Parking them at the Earth-Sun L1 point would be better for solar power, but it would be more expensive to get stuff there.

> you'd have no solar power half the time

Polar orbit.

Seasons mess that up unless you're burning fuel to make minor plane changes every day. Otherwise you have an equinox where your plane faces the sun (equivalent to an equatorial orbit) and a solstice where your plane is parallel to the sun (the ideal case).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit A Sun Synchronous orbit at the Day-Night terminator solves this issue

I didn't think of that! I should have had a V8. Thanks for the info.

Huh, I didn't know that that was possible without burning fuel. Kind of wild that it only works because the Earth has an equatorial bulge and isn't an exact sphere.

True. It would a tradeoff with the fuel consumed vs doubling power output.

Satellites can spin! You also need to deal with precession and other minor chances in the orbit, but they’re all solved problems.

> SpaceX already has Starlink. They might need pretty high bandwidth

you mean the network that has less capacity than a fibre pair per coverage area?