In a sense, this whole thing was inevitable. Elon Musk and his coterie have been talking about AI in space for years—mainly in the context of Iain Banks’ science fiction series about a far-future universe where sentient spaceships roam and control the galaxy.
Now, Musk sees an opportunity to realize a version of this vision. His company SpaceX has requested regulatory permission to build solar-powered orbital data centers, distributed across as many as a million satellites, that could shift as much as 100 GW of compute power off the planet. He has reportedly suggested some of his AI satellites will be built on the Moon.
“By far the cheapest place to put AI will be space in 36 months or less,” Musk said last week on a podcast hosted by Stripe cofounder John Collison.
He’s not alone. xAI’s head of compute has reportedly bet his counterpart at Anthropic that 1% of global compute will be in orbit by 2028. Google (which has a significant ownership stake in SpaceX) has announced a space AI effort called Project Suncatcher, which will launch prototype vehicles in 2027. Starcloud, a start-up that has raised $34 million backed by Google and Andreessen Horowitz, filed its own plans for an 80,000 satellite constellation last week. Even Jeff Bezos has said this is the future.
But behind the hype, what will it actually take to get data centers into space?
In a first analysis, today’s terrestrial data centers remain cheaper than those in orbit. Andrew McCalip, a space engineer, has built a helpful calculator comparing the two models. His baseline results show that a 1 Gw orbital data center might cost $42.4B—almost three times its ground-bound equivalent, thanks to the up-front costs of building the satellites and launching them to orbit.
Changing that equation, experts say, will require technology development across several fields, massive capital expenditure, and a lot of work on the supply chain for space-grade components. It also depends on costs on the ground rising as resources and supply chains are strained by growing demand.
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