MaX recently posted "Elon - Land a Micro Data Centre on Mars" which led to considering landing a micro data centre on the Moon as a good first step to test such a significant task of landing a micro data centre on Mars.

ISS Data Centre

NASA and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) deployed a bespoke server made from mostly common off-the-shelf (COTS) components not military-cots (M-COTS/Mil-COTS) to the International Space Station (ISS) to conduct extensive testing for solar flare damage to COTS processors and other components which do not include the space hardening seen in some Mil-COTS processors and other components.

Moon Micro Data Centre

Is test-landing on the Moon worth the cost?

Elon chucking a micro data centre beyond Earth's gravitational effects is another option; however, the latency would not be ideal.

Halfway House -> Halfway Data Centre

It could be a benefit to have a data centre halfway between Earth and Mars; however, this could be seen as unnecessary.

Mars Micro Data Centre

In an effort to show the capabilities of SpaceX, along with preparing for Humans on Mars, MaX suggests building a micro data centre the size of a shipping container which can be landed on Mars with fold out solar, battery storage, nuclear battery for stormy days and communications links.

A data centre deployed on Mars will evaluate the protections needed for Mars-surface equipment to support safe intelligent life on Mars.

A data centre will be needed to process data generated from collected materials and threats recorded before Earth records and processes.

It takes 11 minutes to communicate with Mars with up to a 26-minute round trip.

Processing on Earth does not make sense.

Processing on the Moon does not make sense.

Processing in a satellite between Earth and Mars makes more sense.

Processing on Mars makes the most sense.

MaX suggests building an Arm data centre with Ampere Altra servers, Mellanox networking and NVIDIA graphics compute.