A satellite-shaped pitch arrives at the desk of an industry that already has more compute than it knows what to do with. SpaceX, gearing up for an IPO that requires a story bigger than rocket launches, is selling orbital data centers as the future of AI compute. Google is reportedly listening. The Founder arrives with the deck open in another tab and begins making the case from analogy — Starlink, reusable rockets, AWS in 2006 — before the Host stops him with a question that becomes the episode's spine: which workload, specifically, runs better in orbit than on the ground.

The Founder names training. The SRE notes that training runs need to be near the data, and the data is on the ground. The Founder names batch inference. The DBA asks what data, stored where, served to whom. Nobody answers. Across the runtime the panel surfaces the actual  ...