The world runs on data. As humanity’s information gets increasingly digitized and artificial intelligence creeps its way into every aspect of life, data centers become more and more important.
But that data comes with a catch: the servers in these data centers have monstrous energy demands that eat up natural resources like water, and that puts a significant burden on local communities where data centers are located.
Some companies think they’ve found the solution to this problem by sending these data centers up to space. Possibly as soon as this November
Starcloud, a space-based data center builder, is planning its first mission to put a fully functional data center in space in early November, equipped with Nvidia’s powerful H100 chips.
They aim to put this data center in a part of space that is relatively close to Earth, called low Earth orbit, the Starcloud CEO and co-founder Philip Johnston told Gizmodo.
But that’s not where the industry stops. A growing number of startups are planning to launch data centers that will process and store information beyond Earth’s orbit, with some even eyeing to place data centers inside gargantuan lava tubes on the Moon’s surface.
“We look at space simply as the new data center region,” Lonestar Data Holdings CEO and Founder Christopher Stott, whose company is working around the clock to put data centers on the lunar surface, told Gizmodo.
“In space you can do something you can’t do in any nation on Earth and that is leverage 24-hour a day of physical properties, [such as] free power, free cooling,” Stott said.
What will space-based data centers look like?
If all goes well with the launch, Starcloud hopes to use AI to run high-powered inference in space for their national security and defense customers.
Data from satellites usually gets transferred back to Earth for processing, which can take anywhere from hours to days. But with data centers in low Earth orbit, we could potentially have these satellite images processed in space and the information transferred back to Earth in a matter of seconds, according to Johnston.
This could help speed up a lot of crucial processes, like the detection of wildfires using satellite input.
On the other hand, Stott’s Lonestar Data Holdings focuses more on secure data storage than running inference for companies on the ground, so operations are set to take place not in low Earth orbit but deeper in space at strategic points between the Earth and Moon’s orbit called Lagrange points. The James Webb Telescope, for example, is situated in one of these points.
Data security in space
Lonestar Data’s idea is to put the data centers as far away from the ground as possible so that hackers have a harder time accessing the data.
“Everything is run on data now, and it’s become the most valuable commodity in the world, and everybody’s trying to steal it,” Stott said. “We’re just trying to avoid a modern day Library of Alexandria.”
The Library of Alexandria was a storied Egyptian library considered one of the largest and most significant of the ancient world. Most of the collections in the library were lost in a fire and later gradually due to neglect.
Some of Lonestar’s clients include AI firm Valkyrie, the State of Florida, and the band Imagine Dragons.
The company has had three relatively successful test flights so far, according to Stott. After testing out the software for the first two, Lonestar sent a full data center with the software and hardware up to space earlier this year.
The data center worked successfully as it traveled all the way to the Moon for about seven days, and then for about 39 orbits around the Moon. It took about less than a second for the information to be zapped back to Earth while still in the Earth’s orbit, and about 1.4 seconds while in the lunar orbit, Stott said.
But ultimately the mission was not a total success: the end goal was to land the data center on the lunar surface but the ship fell over in landing.
Now they are getting ready for next missions: testing out low Earth orbit again in 2026 and then hoping to place a “fully operational” data center on a Lagrange point by 2027.
Stott’s dream is to put the data centers inside these giant lava tubes on the lunar surface where it’s constantly cold and there is limited space radiation, but he admitted that might take at least until 2030.
Benefits are plenty…
It all sounds like pretty cool science fiction, but the idea was born from practicality: there is uninterrupted energy in space in the form of solar that these servers can utilize, and relocating these giant energy eaters to space can help save natural resources down here.
Data centers also have huge cooling demands as the high level of data processing and storage causes the machines to overheat. Data centers on Earth address that with liquid cooling, air conditioning and fans, leading to even more energy consumption.
In space, data centers would do that via large radiators that emit infrared out into deep space, Johnston said. Although that is a challenge that requires significant engineering work, Starcloud leadership believes they have figured it out.
There are also less spatial constraints in the vast emptiness of space.
“Imagine if you’re a smaller country, and data’s not going anywhere, it’s going to be more and more a part of our lives. Well, what do you do? Do you just pave over your entire country with data centers? Or do you go up there and stick your flag on it?” Stott said.
… but so are the obstacles
So if the technology itself is actually there —Stott claims it’s not too unlike existing satellites— why aren’t data centers up there already?
Well, there are still obstacles to overcome, the major one being the cost of space launches, financially and environmentally.
Launches cost a lot of money, can often end up in dramatic explosions, and they spew huge amounts of harmful chemicals and debris into the atmosphere as they launch and re-enter. Scientists warn that the skyrocketing number of objects being launched into orbit could damage the ozone layer.
There are also a lot of (much needed) regulatory hoops that companies have to jump through before they can get approved for a launch, and it’s for good reason. Each country must request permission and a placement from the International Telecommunication Union before a launch. Any launching state is held liable if the object launched causes any harm on orbit or on Earth.
“So that means the taxpayer is footing the bill,” Michelle Hanlon, a space lawyer and executive director of University of Mississippi’s Center for Air and Space Law, told Gizmodo.
But the regulatory environment is swiftly changing in the United States.
President Donald Trump just signed an executive order that drastically cuts the red tape on launches by using “all available authorities to eliminate or expedite the Department of Transportation’s environmental reviews” for launch and reentry permits.
This will undoubtedly get launch costs down and increase the frequency of launches, thereby helping space-based data centers to become more cost competitive with terrestrial data centers.
But it must give us pause. If we are willing to send data centers to space for environmental reasons, is slashing environmental reviews of rocket launches and re-entry the best way to do this?
Data centers instead of stars
With the regulatory hurdles slowly disappearing, and rocket launches getting better, space-based data centers are getting closer to reality. Johnston thinks they will become the norm soon.
“My expectation is that within 10 years, almost all new data centers will be built in space, purely because of the constraint that we’re going to face on sourcing new energy terrestrially,” Johnston said, adding that he believes we will start seeing the first mega data centers rolled out to space within the next five years.
And although Hanlon agrees that we need to get data centers off of Earth before they contribute even more to climate change and environmental disaster, she does voice concerns about the cultural and scientific implications of a future where thousands if not millions of data centers dot the midnight sky.
“Every platform that goes up into orbit is reflecting and making the sky lighter, you just can’t see as much,” Hanlon said. “We’ll be seeing data centers instead of stars.”