I've heard this before. A datacenter and a starlink sattelite are not in the same ballpark of power usage and heat dissipation needs. The are orders of magnitude off from each other.

The point is that you don’t need to put a whole datacenter into a single satellite. You can put a single rack per satellite and have different racks communicate via antennas, laser links, or perhaps even wires since they’ll be launched in groups of 10-50 anyway. You could also dock them to each other, but that’s not necessarily needed.

I don't understand what makes these "datacenters" if they're distributed across satellites with WAN-esque interconnect.

Are we overloading the term "datacenter"? Or is it not overloaded but somehow able to achieve datacenter-like speeds / (tail) latency even when distributed across satellites?

Ok, but then what's the point? How is having a small amount of compute in space useful?