The idea that we can’t get enough electrical power on earth because of supply constraints, but that we can solve that by launching the datacenters and their entire support infrastructure into space makes no sense unless you’re a huckster trying to pump up your space launch business ahead of an IPO. There’s no way we are more constrained on land-based solar+battery equipment than we would be on space-worthy solar+battery+space-cooling equipment plus sufficient launch infrastructure and resources. Meanwhile, our government is paying companies to stop building wind power and bombing sources of natural gas.
sheesh i didn't say a datacenter-in-space was a good/feasibnle idea. The point i was making is I feel that building power plants to power a datacenter is turning out to be harder than software people realize and multi-year (or worse) delays likely the result.
Space DC make sense when local governments and communities don't want DC built on Earth. Space DC is an engineering and finance problem, not a problem in legal/permission, real estate, power generation, grid delivery, environmental, etc.
You think that building out space infrastructure is a less hard problem to solve than bribing a few local governments to get some building permits?
Isn't it still far simpler and cheaper to build and maintain a DC in the most rural parts of North America than to launch it to space?
For whatever reason, nobody is trying to build solar-powered AI datacenters. Maybe they can't find enough land.
Half the time you get 0 solar power.
The space required to install enough solar panels, especially in the places these things are going (like Ohio, where it's NOT ideal for solar generation), would far, far outsize the data center itself by a significant magnitude.
It takes 2.5 million solar panels to generate 1GW of electricity assuming 400W per panel and direct sunlight. 2.5M times 18 sq ft per panel is about 1000 acres or ~1.55 sq mi.<p>That would work for a 1 GW data center, during the day, without clouds, during the summer.
Is that supposed to be a lot? The US is some 3.8 million square miles.<p>A decade old Reddit thread estimated there are 60 square miles of just McDonalds in the country. That is, a McDonalds country footprint of solar panels alone is 39GW.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/2bq7l2/so_if_mcdonalds_with_all_their_real_estate_pooled/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/2bq7l2/so_i...</a>
The US gov't owns at least 50% of every state in the west. Or they could just build in the middle of bum f*ck Texas and get fossil and renewables. Too bad Texas' grid is so piss poor
Space Datacenters are an engineering problem (laws of physics allows it)<p>Earth Datacenters are a human, NIMBY, ego, misinformation, legal, bureaucracy problem.<p>I'm going to bet on Space Datacenters.<p>Edit: classic HN lacking imagination and always wrong about the future<p><a href="https://youtu.be/FKHENV75b9Q?si=JFBsT2HinR02AI4P" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/FKHENV75b9Q?si=JFBsT2HinR02AI4P</a>
Sending to LEO costs around $2,700 usd and 9kWh of fuel per kilogram.<p>If you manage to send a data center with high end processing units, large array of solar panels, even larger liquid cooling and tick shielding against solar rays you’d have spent probably 100x to 1000x the cost of an equivalent earth data center even without considering hardware deprecation.<p>You’re better off sinking your data center deep in the sea and even that is probably not happening at large scales.
<a href="https://youtu.be/FKHENV75b9Q?si=JFBsT2HinR02AI4P" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/FKHENV75b9Q?si=JFBsT2HinR02AI4P</a>
I tried to find what the worst option is other than putting them in space and you can do a lot! Trucking diesel to the middle of the Sahara is a decent option in comparison to space.
Space data centers are an intrinsically cool idea, and honestly I hope we see at least one for the sheer marvel of such a project. But to be cost efficient, it has to be cheaper than rural US, cheaper than buying some island, cheaper than setting it up on a converted freighter ship and tanking the fuel in, etc.<p>BUT once Earth has a fully paid off space elevator the unit economics will make sense, or if we have orbital space factories and don't have any lift costs, etc. It's all possible, but at a 50 year+ timescale and immense investment. All of which I hope for because I'd like to see more space development and exploration.
I think the question here is: do the laws of economics allow it?
Space data centers require hundreds of daily launches. Disney and the massive industries around Canaveral will NIMBY it hard.
How much SpaceX stock did you buy? Are you buying this dip?
How do the laws of physics allow it? How do you disperse the heat? How do you protect your compute from cosmic rays? How do you get enough solar up there without catastrophic damage from micrometeorites?
Ars Technica is doing a series on this. They have published 2/3 parts so far. <a href="https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-build-orbital-data-centers-actually/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-buil...</a>
I think the company that has managed to launch and currently operates ~10k satellites can figure those out. Still remains to be seen if the economics make sense, but with increased "anti" stuff happening all around (some of which surely is manufactured) who knows? 5 - 10 years from now things might change.
On Earth it has to be fossil fuels. With solar you can't do it. I haven't done the calculations myself so, full disclosure, AI work ahead. But I asked GPT 5.6 how big a solar and battery farm would have to be to power a one gigawatt datacenter such that it could ride out a few cloudy days in a row (this is far below the reliability bar).<p>Its answer is you'd need an "absurdly large battery" and a solar farm of over 100 square kilometers, quite possibly up to over 200 square kilometers. And it would need to be built in the desert.<p>Also, normal utility scale LiON battery sites are only meant to provide stabilization services for hours, not days.<p>The problem is you have to overspec the solar farm quite a lot because it must not only be able to power a one gigawatt facility, but also generate more than that so it can recharge the battery packs during the day too.<p>So this just doesn't work. You think datacenter permitting is bad when it only requires some on-site gas turbines? Imagine the difficulty of getting a 200 square kilometer solar farm over the finishing line.<p>No, it's quite possible Elon is going to win this one. Regulation is expensive! He can just fire a constant stream of satellites into space. The constellation needed to provide a gigawatt of inferencing would be about the same size as today's Starlink system, well within the bounds of what he's proven can be done.<p>The threat to space based datacenters isn't really the physics of it. It's the risk of a bubble pop that temporarily craters demand and/or an overbuild of terrestrial capacity. Outside of the software industry we don't see huge new blocks of inferencing demand, and OpenAI at least doesn't seem capacity constrained at all right now.
100 square kilometers sounds like a big area. And it is, in continental Europe or in an urban area. In Montana, it's enough space for a few hundred cows. In desert regions, it's worth even less. You can buy 100 square kilometres of unserviced desert land for ~$10M.
How do you cool the data center in space cost effectively? Unfortunately in space there isn't a lot of material (air) to transfer the heat.
Why restrict yourself to 100% solar? Solar augmented by grid is pretty great.<p>Also, you very conspicuously avoided talking about the difficulty/impact of a 1GW datacenter in space. One might suspect your motives aren't as impartial as you seem to think.
The whole problem is difficulty getting grid connections on Earth. If you can just hook up to the grid then why not just use it for everything.<p>I don't have any motives, what are you talking about? I don't own SpaceX stock if that's what you're thinking.<p>What's the difficulty of a 1GW datacenter in space? The number of satellites it requires seems to be within the realm of what SpaceX has already achieved. If the calculations are wrong, by all means say so, I haven't checked them.