SAN FRANCISCO — If the architects of the artificial intelligence boom are right, it’s only a matter of time before data centers — the gigantic computing facilities that power AI — float in orbit and are visible in the night sky like planets.
The sci-fi dream is driven by leaders in the AI and space industries, who are increasingly concerned that data centers will end up requiring more energy and more space than is available on Earth. So one solution — perhaps the only solution, they say — is to start building them in space.
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Google announced in November that it was working on Project Suncatcher, a space data center project that would begin test launches in 2027. Elon Musk recently said at a conference that data centers in space would be the cheapest way to train AI “in five years at most.”
Others who have pledged support for the idea include Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin; Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI; and Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia.
“It’s not a debate — it’s going to happen,” said Philip Johnston, CEO of Starcloud, a space data center startup. “The question is when.”
The notion has gained traction as the AI race has reached a fever point, fueling fears of a possible bubble. Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon and other major technology companies are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in data centers around the world, with OpenAI alone committing $1.4 trillion to these projects.
Saudi Arabia and other countries are also pouring money into these efforts, while smaller companies accumulate debt and take on financial risks to enter the fray.
Still, land-based data centers are increasingly coming up against limits. In many places, projects do not have enough available power for computing needs. Local opposition has also emerged over whether data centers are increasing utility bills and worsening water shortages.
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This has led to more creative — some would say more optimistic — ideas with space data centers. Technicians and scientists have researched the idea and concluded that some version of these projects may be viable in the coming decades. But skeptics say the proposals contravene physical laws and would be astronomically expensive.
Prominent technology figures such as Musk have also recently commented on space data centers on a much larger scale than current research suggests is possible, said Pierre Lionnet, a space economist and director of Eurospace, an industry association.
“It’s completely senseless,” he said.
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NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Agency) introduced the idea of space data centers in the 1960s. In the 1980s, the concept of “data repositories” in space appeared in science fiction stories. Over the past decade, the notion of space data centers capable of powering modern AI has also emerged.
The main benefit of building a data center in space is abundant energy, with nearly 24-hour access to the sun and no clouds to obstruct the project’s solar panels, Johnston said. There are also fewer environmental regulations than on Earth, not to mention no neighbors to object to the installation or complain about the electricity bill.
But feasibility depends on whether it will be cheaper to launch materials into space and whether technical problems such as radiation and refrigeration can be solved in the meantime. Experts differ on how quickly these conditions can be met.
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“As a business thesis, it’s plausible,” said Phil Metzger, a physics professor at the University of Central Florida and a former NASA physicist. “It’s an evolving discussion.”
Data centers in space would be different from football stadium-sized facilities on Earth. Most visual concepts from companies like Starcloud look like large satellites, with a cluster of servers housing AI chips at the center of miles of solar panels to power them.
Data centers would have to be rebuilt every five years, which is when chips are typically replaced, Starcloud’s Johnston said. They would be visible at dawn and dusk from Earth, appearing in the sky about a quarter the width of the moon, he said.
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But it’s too expensive to create space data centers today. A kilogram of material costs about $8,000 to launch into space, Lionnet said. The cheapest rate — about $2,000 per kilogram — is offered by rocket maker SpaceX, he added. Individual server racks in a data center can weigh more than 1,000 pounds.
If space launch costs drop to about $200 per kilogram, the savings will start to make sense, Metzger said.
He predicts this will take about a decade. In a research paper on Suncatcher published in November, Google predicted that costs could fall to that level “by the mid-2030s,” comparing the timeline to its autonomous robo-taxis, which took 15 years to develop.
Modern chips and semiconductors also aren’t made to withstand radiation in space, which would hamper their ability to compute reliably, said Benjamin Lee, a professor of electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.
And although space is a freezing -235ºC, it is also a vacuum. This means there is no air to transfer heat from the AI chips. To cool them, data centers would instead need large radiator panels to dissipate heat.
Obstacles like this haven’t stopped people like Musk, who leads SpaceX and the artificial intelligence startup xAI.
Musk began discussing space data centers with others in November on X, the social platform he owns, saying that “serious scaling of AI” would have to “be done in space.”
In another post, he considered building 300 gigawatts of space data centers, which would require more than half the energy the United States uses in a year.
Bret Johnsen, SpaceX’s chief financial officer, said in a letter to shareholders last month that the company would explore an initial public offering next year in part to raise money for projects including “AI data centers in space.”
SpaceX and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Tom Mueller, a former SpaceX executive who believes humans will reach the limit of terrestrial energy sources by 2040, said part of the reason Musk and other AI leaders are talking about space data centers is the financial opportunity.
“The hottest thing to invest in right now is AI, and the second hottest thing is space,” Mueller said. “Now they are converging.”
c.2026 The New York Times Company
