I agree, that this is at the moment not a viable thing and especially the SpaceX “concept” is complete bullshit.

I do not agree with some of your points, since they are solved/irrelevant (e.g. “regular maintenance”, “low latency”) or could be overcome with reasonable tech advances (e.g. “rockets prohibitively expensive”, “radiation shielding”).

Let me steelman the argument a bit with this single bit of - sadly forgotten - “super cool and innovative tech”: “Underwater data center”, like project Natick (Microsoft) or the Chinese project:

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/chinas-hicloud-launches-wind-powered-underwater-data-center-targets-500mw-subsea-deployment/

Soooooo, if we will ever see something other than our current land based data centers, we will see millions of ocean data centers, before we will ever see a single commercial space data center.

Reasons:

• Delivery is super cheap (in comparison to space) at scale, thanks to the already existing wind farm infrastructure
• Weight is not an issue
• Cooling is solved
• Maintenance is not necessary, but replacement is. Easy on scale, because modular.
• No radiation shielding necessary
• Connection: data cable = no extra lag or quantity limit

Oh, and by the way, it is still not clear if even ocean data center will be viable. Just found this 😂

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/spacexs-orbital-data-centers-could-face-same-hurdles-microsofts-abandoned-2026-04-01/