Introducing: Microsoft Cosmos!

Send your data to heaven while we turn the planet into hell!

My understanding is that these “datacenters” would be used exclusively for model training, where latency doesn’t matter.

It is still an outrageously stupid idea for a zillion other engineering reasons, though.

most moons

Pretty much every moon but Titan. Titan, however, would be excellent for heat dissipation. Long before generative AI was even a thing, scientists have speculated that Titan would be the perfect place for datacenters because low-temperature computation is so much more efficient.

Of course, building a datacenter on Titan would be a several-hundred-trillion dollar endeavor, so… good luck bootstrapping your way into that industry.

It’s also clever politics. Minnesota has the largest iron mining operations in the entire United States, so choosing iron as your core battery technology is a smart (albeit cynical) way to drum to some local support with the promise of bringing new demand back to the taconite mines.

Whether that will be strong enough to overcome the extreme negative sentiments around datacenter projects? Who knows…