Why Space May Be the Only Right Place for Data Centers

A data center in orbit would have no power lines overhead, cooling towers nearby or neighbors protesting around it. Solar energy could reach the servers directly, while the machines circled Earth hundreds of kilometers above the ground.

That vision is moving beyond science fiction. SpaceX has applied for permission to operate as many as one million computing satellites, and an Nvidia H100 accelerator has already worked in orbit.

Elon Musk has predicted that space could become the cheapest place to run artificial intelligence within a few years. The attraction is clear in the imagined setup: sunlight is available directly in space, and operators could avoid some of the infrastructure and local opposition associated with large data centers on Earth.

But the proposal faces an opponent that cannot be financed away or persuaded to accept a later deadline: thermodynamics. The article presents that physical constraint as the central challenge to the idea of moving large-scale computing into orbit.