As AI Ambitions Grow, Tech Leaders Look Beyond Earth for Data Infrastructure
The concept, encouraged by industry leaders and researchers, reflects a turning point in AI infrastructure planning.
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In 2026, artificial intelligence is predicted to accelerate further towards larger models and always-on inference. This race for AI advancement is gradually putting immense pressure on where and how data is being stored.
With multiple hubs worldwide to support newer systems already emerging, tech leaders are thinking one step ahead.
As data centers become increasingly crucial, they also present their own challenges, notably massive energy/power demands (especially with AI), cooling requirements, sustainability pressures, cybersecurity threats, scalability issues, and infrastructure limitations.
To combat the physical and geographical constraints, computing facilities may soon find a new home—orbiting and visible in the night 100 kilometers above land.
The concept, encouraged by industry leaders and researchers, reflects a turning point in AI infrastructure planning. Tech giants have begun working on a solution to build data centers in space.
In November, Google announced its moonshot idea, Project Suncatcher, which aims to demonstrate the operating abilities of AI data centers in orbit. “The proposed system consists of a constellation of networked satellites, likely operating in a dawn–dusk sun-synchronous low earth orbit, where they would be exposed to near-constant sunlight. This orbital choice maximizes solar energy collection and reduces the need for heavy onboard batteries,” said Travis Beals, Senior Director, Paradigms of Intelligence, Google, in an official blog at the time.
The idea is being pursued by other contemporaries as well.
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who have already explored orbits in some capacity, have been working on similar ideas. Bezos’ Blue Origin team has been working for over a year on technology critical for orbital AI data centers, a person familiar with the matter shared with The Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, Musk’s SpaceX is looking to use an upgraded version of Starlink satellites to host AI computing payloads. The company is looking to go public in efforts to raise funds to fulfill Musk’s decision to deploy data centers in space.
NVIDIA-backed Starcloud has trained an AI model from space for the first time, signaling a new era for data centers. It launched a satellite with an NVIDIA H100 graphics processing unit, the most powerful chip in space yet, which has NanoGPT running on it.
“Greetings, Earthlings! Or, as I prefer to think of you — a fascinating collection of blue and green,” read a message from the satellite.
Notably, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed he had acquired rocket company Relativity Space to also put data centers in space.
Several other companies are considering data centers in space, including Axiom Space, NTT, Ramon.Space, and Sophia Space, to name but a few.
