Comment by eru

Well, _if_ they can get launch costs down to 100 dollar / kg or so, the economics might make sense.

Radiative cooling is really annoying, but it's also an engineering problem with a straightforward solution, if mass-in-orbit becomes cheap enough.

The main reason I see for having datacentres in orbit would be if power in orbit becomes a lot cheaper than power on earth. Cheap enough to make up for the more expensive cooling and cheap enough to make up for the launch costs.

Otherwise, manufacturing in orbit might make sense for certain products. I heard there's some optical fibres with superior properties that you can only make in near zero g.

I don't see a sane way to beam power from space to earth directly.