There's no point, is the thing. It's literally just moron tier bait for investors, almost a parody of itself (what if we built data centers, but in SPACE). Nobody needs that. The massive explosion in demand for compute is pointless in the first place anyways.

They are absolutely possible technology and could be constructed in such a way as to be viable.

Cooling in spaces a massive pain in the arse but if you do it at large enough of a scale it actually becomes efficient.

The problem is we need access to a space elevator before we could build at that scale otherwise you'd be sending up hundreds of rockets just to build data center 20% the size of anything we could construct on Earth. Which would obviously be pointless.

So Elon Musk should be working on a space elevator. Except he can't because that would involve advanced physics and material engineering, both of which he is crap at, given the fact that he tried to make a car out of pig iron.

To be clear, they are absolutely possible. There’s nothing preventing them with today’s technology beyond cost.

That doesn’t make musks statements correct. You can’t “easily” cool things in space. Virtually none of the conventional cooling methods work as most rely on heat moving from hot thing to cold thing, that cold thing usually being air in the end. But in space, where there is only vacuum and no air, heat will just build up until whatever is heating it breaks.

As the original tweet said, you can still get rid of heat, but it’s much slower (unless you’re ejecting super heated material regularly) and is quite inefficient.