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.
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