> Starlink has deployed 50x the ISS's solar cap across its entire fleet (admittedly 3 years ago); the author's calcs are 500x the ISS for one datacenter.
So 3 years ago they managed to get to 10% of the power budget of one data center by accident, using satellites not explicitly designed for that purpose, using a partially reusable launch platform with 1/10th the payload capacity of Starship. My point is they've already demonstrated they can do this at the scale that's needed.
> A single Starlink satellite is using power in the order of watts
Then why does each satellite have a 6 kW solar array? Re-read that post I linked; the analysis is pretty thorough.
> Don't their current satellites have like 100Gbps capacity max?
Gen 3 is reportedly up to 1 Tbps ground link capacity, for one satellite.[1] There will be thousands.
> Do you have any idea how many 100Gbps routers go into connecting a single datacenter to the WAN? Or to each other (since intrahall model training is table stakes these days).
Intra-satellite connections use the laser links and would not consume any ground link capacity.
You're also ignoring that this is explicitly being pitched as a solution for compute-heavy workloads (AI training and inference) not bandwidth-heavy workloads.
[1]: https://starlink.com/updates/network-update