Apparently it made enough financial sense to do these prior to the AI boom when data center builds were more calculated risks that needed enough traffic to justify them. Deciding to put them in space is just pure AI bubble hype though… It’s not nearly as sexy to say “we’re building AI data centers at the bottom of the ocean so they can be close to subsea fiber optic cables and get free cooling!”

My understanding of undersea datacenters were that they were high visibility pilots which never resulted in any materially significant number of installation. Not any different than whats going on with the space borne hype. Them being below wave action isn’t relevant. They could be at the bottom of a lake for all that matters. The at-sea datacenters are just as much goofy hype as the spaceborne ones.