> There are literally enormous problems powering AI data centers on the Earth right now.

Political, not technical.

Going to space replaces a domestic problem of angry locals with an international problem of angry governments.

> No, we don't have the power on Earth.

The power problem isn't meaningfully improved by going to space.

For every GW you put in a sun synchronous orbit to get permanent light, you need around 6 GW in the major world deserts given their cloud cover. But! The ones on the ground last 30-40 years, while the satellites are currently expected to get replaced every 5 years, so the quantity which need to be manufactured each year to maintain fixed useful output is actually about the same.

For scale:

The world installed 445 GW in 2024, and this number has a long term growth trend in the range of 25-35% per year.

If SpaceX's proposed million satellite constellation are each 25 kW modules, the total they need to launch is 25 GW, the ground equivalent is 25*6 GW = 150 GW, so we could deploy something of this scale on the ground three times over in 2024, and probably around 11-18 times in 2030 if trends continue.

And to pre-empt someone what-abouting night, between cars and PowerWall Tesla supplies about 150 GWh of batteries each year, so provided they didn't need replacing more often than every four years on average this would be enough to supply a data centre that size for 24 hours, long enough to wait for the sun to return and supply enough to be charging rather than draining batteries.

Of course, America only controls one such desert. China has another, makes most of the PV and far more batteries, but America wants to treat this situation as a race against China.