There's an interesting company, Panthalassa [1], thats working on harnessing open ocean wave energy to generate electicity, and run inference with it. [2]
[1] https://panthalassa.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4PCJRN7yGs (interview with the founder)
> People are radically overestimating the cost of space post-Starship
Just going off what the folks working on it say.
> Speaking at The Information's recent WTF Summit in Napa Valley, Amanda Peterson Corio, Google's global head of data center energy, said data centers in space could cost up to 100 times as much as those built on the ground.
> Her advice to the rest of the industry was simple and (pun intended) grounded: "Let's explore all the terrestrial options before we go extraterrestrial."
https://www.techradar.com/pro/just-a-moonshot-google-energy-...
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?