“For orbital data centers, which he says will be a cost-effective alternative to terrestrial data centers within three years, the math won’t make sense for several years, if ever.”
Musk’s pitch is that you skip the cooling problem by putting servers in space, conveniently ignoring that space is a terrible place to dump heat since there’s no air to convect it into. Radiative cooling at datacenter scale means enormous panels, enormous mass, enormous launch costs, none of which pencil out against a terrestrial rack sitting next to a river. “Within three years” is doing the same work it always does in these announcements: buying time until nobody remembers the promise.