Here on Earth, regulators and citizens alike are realizing that there may be downsides to completely caving in to the demands of AI data centers and the companies that build them, and pushback is starting to become more prevalent. But in space, no one can hear you objecting to the huge energy demands and dubious economic “benefits” of these huge infrastructure projects. According to the Wall Street Journal, that’s why Jeff Bezos (just after announcing his AI startup Project Prometheus) and other tech billionaires are reaching for the stars and planning to put data centers in orbit.
The idea of a space-based data center has been kicking around for some time. Bezos spoke about this at Italian Tech Week last month, where he told the audience, “We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space over the next few decades.” Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company’s own space-based data venture earlier this month, called Project Suncatcher. Nvidia has also got in on the action, announcing plans for an orbital data center. Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp recently said that there will be data centers in space “in our lifetime.”
And of course, Elon Musk has made the most ambitious and optimistic pitch yet on how AI could work in space. At a recent Barron Capital conference, Musk suggested that Starlink satellites would be able to generate 100 gigawatts of electricity every year using solar power. “We have a plan to do it,” he said. “It gets crazy.” There’s never been a friendlier audience to receive that message: Baron Capital backed Musk’s $1 trillion pay package at Tesla, and its founder, Ron Baron, has talked up Tesla at every opportunity, including a recent CNBC hit where he said the company could be a $10,000 stock.
Tech executives struggling with their AI data centers cluttering up space are relying on University of Central Florida research professor Phil Metzger. As the WSJ points out, Metzger recently expressed his support for the data center space race, writing on
There are some intuitive reasons why aiming for the stars makes sense for data centers. Orbital data centers could save us from having to sell all our precious terrestrial real estate to big, mostly empty boxes of rotating wings and information-crunching chips. And they will be closer to the Sun to take advantage of solar energy capabilities. But actually achieving this goal is not as simple as setting up a few servers in a classroom. Data centers generate a lot of heat and need to be cooled, and letting that heat dissipate into space is inefficient and possibly inadequate. It’s possible to assemble data centers in space, but maintaining them can be challenging – and any failure will be more difficult than on Earth.
Then there’s the fact that we’re dealing with an already increasingly crowded orbital area. A recent study found that satellites in orbit are performing collision-avoidance maneuvers at seven times the frequency than just five years ago, and the more we send into orbit, the more these precautions will become increasingly necessary.
We have another option: put the brakes on AI buildout before we become so committed that we fill the planet and space with technology that can never be used in any meaningful way. Unfortunately, it looks like it may be an even larger moon.