Data centers in space

Data centers in space (orbital data centers) are AI computing capacity moved onto satellites: the chips run on solar panels, shed heat by radiating it into space, and talk to each other and to Earth by laser and radio. The bet is that in the right orbit the sun shines almost around the clock, and a panel, by Google’s estimate, produces up to 8 times more energy than on Earth, with no need to fight over land, water and grid connections.¹

The idea was tested in engineering studies, and in 2025 the largest companies took it up. In November 2025 the startup Starcloud put the first data-center-class GPU, an NVIDIA H100, into orbit; in 2026 SpaceX, Starcloud and Blue Origin filed applications for constellations ranging from tens of thousands to a million computing satellites, and Google launched its first prototype with four TPUs. Only single computing satellites are flying, and there is not a single megawatt-scale system in orbit; SpaceX itself writes in its prospectus that no one has yet operated orbital AI compute in its sense of the term, constellations working as data centers.²³⁴⁵⁶

History

• 27.06.2024Thales Alenia Space publishes the results of the EU-funded ASCEND study: for space data centers to cut CO₂ emissions noticeably, a launcher ten times less “dirty” over its entire life cycle is needed; the project aims for one gigawatt by 2050.⁷ ¶ ctjsw8xd9
• 09.2024In a white paper, Lumen Orbit (later Starcloud) compares a 40 MW cluster over 10 years: $167 million on Earth versus $8.2 million in space, but without the cost of the enclosure and all other hardware, which it counts as roughly the same in both cases.⁸ ¶ c893rzhc2
• 14.05.2025China puts into orbit the first 12 computing satellites of the Three-Body Computing Constellation (Zhejiang Lab).⁹ ¶ csatukzei
• 03.10.2025Jeff Bezos at Italian Tech Week: construction of “giant gigawatt data centres in space” will begin in “10 plus years”, but no later than in 20.¹⁰ ¶ ch922srdz
• 04.11.2025Google announces Project Suncatcher, constellations of TPU satellites connected by laser links; a bench test reached 800 Gbps in each direction, and the launch of two prototypes with Planet is scheduled for early 2027.¹ ¶ cm6tw2n5c
• 11.2025Starcloud-1 puts an NVIDIA H100 into orbit; in December the company reports that it trained the small language model NanoGPT on it in space on the complete works of Shakespeare and ran the Gemma model.³¹¹ ¶ c8khfi49t
• 02.02.2026SpaceX announces its acquisition of xAI; Elon Musk writes that a million tons of satellites a year at 100 kW of compute per ton would add 100 GW of AI compute capacity every year.¹² ¶ c9ic79xej
• 04.02.2026The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) accepts for filing SpaceX’s application for a system of up to one million satellites at altitudes of 500–2,000 km, the “SpaceX Orbital Data Center system”, the “first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization”.⁴ ¶ cx5f32ufn
• 13.03.2026The FCC accepts for filing Starcloud’s application for a constellation of up to 88,000 satellites in a 600–850 km sun-synchronous orbit operating as a distributed data center.¹³ ¶ cq9iyz72p
• 16.03.2026NVIDIA unveils its Space Computing line: the Space-1 Vera Rubin module, according to the company, delivers up to 25 times more compute for AI inference in space than the H100; the same day Kepler commissions computing in orbit, 40 Jetson Orin modules on 10 satellites.¹⁴¹⁵ ¶ ckgt5xg69
• 11.06.2026In its IPO prospectus SpaceX writes that it expects to begin deploying orbital AI compute satellites “as early as 2028”, and admits that in this sense “we have not, and no one else has, previously operated or attempted to operate orbital AI compute”.⁵ ¶ ciuh86ams
• 01.10.2026Google puts the first Suncatcher prototype into orbit: a refrigerator-sized satellite with four TPUs; because of heat-dissipation limits, the Gemma model will run on them for 15 minutes at a time. The prototype flies in an ordinary orbit and carries batteries; the sun-synchronous orbit is the plan for the next satellites.¹⁶ ¶ c6fjergnu

How it works

Power. The satellites are placed in a dawn–dusk sun-synchronous orbit, where the panels are lit almost all the time and batteries are barely needed. This is also what makes it, in the words of researcher Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti, “the single most congested highway in low Earth orbit”.¹¹⁷ ¶ cn7udfrpc

Cooling. There is no air, so heat can leave only by radiation, through radiators. By the estimate of Andrew Cavalier of ABI Research, a 40 kW rack needs a radiator of about 80 m², and radiators and solar panels together can make up 65–70% of a satellite’s mass.¹⁸ ¶ cr3fjg3vs

Links and radiation. The satellites of a constellation fly hundreds of meters apart and exchange data by laser. Google irradiated Trillium TPUs with protons: the HBM memory began to show faults after 2 krad, almost three times the dose of five years in orbit behind shielding. Most silent data corruption came from the core logic and on-chip SRAM; scaled to the orbital dose, this is on the order of one error per 3 million model queries.¹⁹ ¶ ce8i6ikd2

Data

What it costs

Why now. On Earth the limit is electricity: in 2023 data centers consumed 4.4% of US electricity, and by 2028 they will consume 6.7–12%; worldwide, their demand will more than double by 2030 to 945 TWh, according to the IEA.²³²⁴ In the second quarter of 2026, according to Data Center Watch, local opposition in the US blocked or delayed at least 45 projects worth $68 billion.²⁵ ¶ c554r9wx9

Criticism

Economics. Investor Jim Chanos called the idea “more AI Snake Oil from the Silicon Valley promoter class”: electricity costs about $600,000 per megawatt a year, which is 5–7% of revenue on recently announced deals, while launch, radiation, insurance and redundancy would cost more. Gartner analyst Bill Ray writes that companies rushing to build data centers in space for tasks on Earth are “wasting time and money on a promise to serve data needs on Earth”.²⁶²⁷ ¶ cbh5n5jj7

Heat and repairs. The US congressional watchdog GAO writes that “space does not cool computing hardware efficiently”, radiation corrupts data unpredictably, and in-space servicing is “underdeveloped”. On Earth, 54 days of Llama 3 pre-training saw 419 unexpected interruptions, about 78% of them confirmed or suspected hardware problems, for example with GPUs; in orbit there is no one to replace parts.²⁸²⁹ ¶ cznrv58k7

Sky and debris. The Royal Astronomical Society warns that of SpaceX’s million satellites, thousands would be visible to the naked eye, and each image from the VLT telescope would lose 10% of its data on average.³⁰ The sun-synchronous orbit is already the most congested, and avoidance is needed ever more often: Starlink satellites alone, in the first half of 2025, performed more than 144,000 collision-avoidance maneuvers.¹⁷ ¶ cmzy2uaqg

Emissions. Even under optimistic assumptions, computing in orbit produces up to an order of magnitude more carbon emissions than on Earth, according to a study in the journal ACM SIGEnergy, mainly because of launch and re-entry.³¹ ¶ cfv6jrg8n

Evolution

Law. The Outer Space Treaty establishes no sovereignty and says nothing explicit about data; jurisdiction under Article VIII covers the object itself, so, as the European Parliamentary Research Service writes, there are calls to introduce the concept of a “digital flag state”. Slots in low Earth orbit are allocated only indirectly, through International Telecommunication Union frequency assignments, generally on a “first-come, first-served” basis.²² ¶ czvw9dcwd

The race. In nine months of testing, China’s Three-Body Computing Constellation deployed 10 AI models in orbit, including two with 8 billion parameters each, and 20 by July 2026; the first 12 satellites, according to China Daily, deliver 5 petaflops combined, and the lab wants about 100 satellites by 2027 and about a thousand by 2032.³²³³ Starcloud, according to Via Satellite, has raised $450 million in total, in August 2026 at a valuation of $2.3 billion, and is building a 20 GW constellation.³⁴ ¶ cy9827bp9