Tech titans are reaching for the stars.
The Wall Street Journal revealed that Blue Origin and SpaceX are exploring putting AI computing power in orbit, tapping into limitless solar energy and shifting the future of where data gets processed. This isn’t some distant sci-fi fantasy anymore — these companies have been working on orbital data center technology for over a year.
The exclusive news report says Blue Origin has reportedly spent over a year developing orbital AI data centers, while SpaceX pitches AI-capable Starlink satellites in its planned share sale that could value the company at around $800 billion.
Space is enticing
The numbers tell a story. Global electricity demand is on track to double by 2050, partly due to AI data centers, and in the US, data centers are the biggest driver of surging power demand.
In 2014, data centers accounted for 1.8% of total U.S. electricity usage. By 2030, data centers’ electricity usage could go up to 9% according to Bain & Co.
Space offers something Earth can’t: unlimited solar power and natural cooling. Solar panels are up to eight times more efficient in orbit than they are on the surface of Earth.
Google’s move
Last month, Google unveiled Project Suncatcher, a research “moonshot” aiming to build a data center in space. Google plans to begin testing this moonshot project with two prototype satellites by 2027.
Google plans to use a constellation of solar-powered satellites, which would run on its own TPU chips and transmit data to one another via lasers. These aren’t just any chips — Google’s TPU chips (tensor processing units), which are specially designed for machine learning, are already powering Google’s latest AI model, Gemini 3.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, said: “When you truly step back and envision the amount of compute we’re going to need, it starts making sense and it’s a matter of time.”
Musk’s counterstrike
Elon Musk isn’t backing down. He confirms SpaceX will build space-based data centers by scaling Starlink V3 satellites with terabit-class capacity. The performance jump is good: Starlink V2 mini satellites max out around 100 Gbps capacity, but Starlink V3 can deliver up to 1 Tbps per satellite.
SpaceX aims to launch 60 high-capacity Starlink V3 satellites per Starship flight starting in 2026. Musk wrote in an X post that Starship should be able to deliver around 300 GW per year of solar-powered AI satellites to orbit, maybe 500 GW.
To put that in perspective: global data center capacity is currently 59 gigawatts on Earth. Musk’s vision would potentially deliver eight times Earth’s current capacity annually.
Ambitious timelines
Multiple players are making aggressive moves. Starcloud sent a satellite equipped with Nvidia’s H100 graphics processing unit to space earlier this month, and Starcloud plans to operate a GPU-based satellite system by 2026.
Axiom Space has outlined plans to deploy orbital data-center nodes by the end of 2025, while Lonestar Data Holdings tested a small data center on the moon in March.
The stakes are becoming clearer. Each milestone represents more than technological achievement — it’s positioning for what could become the most valuable infrastructure in human history.
The engineering challenges
Building orbital infrastructure presents mind-bending technical hurdles. Radiation in space is hostile to delicate electronic devices like GPUs, requiring extensive shielding and redundancy to withstand cosmic radiation and solar events.
Space debris, including spent rocket stages and dead satellites, is a concern for space-based structures. Even worse, constructing massive structures in space could trigger the Kessler syndrome, leading to cascade collisions in orbit.
Equipment maintenance presents unique problems that don’t exist on Earth. Repairing or upgrading orbital hardware presents challenges absent in terrestrial facilities, while radiating heat away from densely packed computing hardware in a vacuum presents engineering challenges.
Economically viable
The economics are shifting rapidly. Google says its research shows that space launch costs are falling fast enough that, by the mid-2030s, the running cost of orbital data centers could be competitive with terrestrial ones.
Launch costs could be lowered to under $200 per kilogram with advancements like SpaceX’s Starship. Google is planning for the mid-2030s when launch costs are projected to drop to as little as $200 per kilogram.
The transformation ahead is intriguing. Orbital computing infrastructure could reshape the cloud services landscape, potentially disrupting terrestrial data center networks of providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Organizations using multi-cloud strategies might soon evaluate orbital providers alongside traditional options.
The race for control
What started as competition between tech billionaires has evolved into something much bigger. Jeff Bezos stated that space will end up being one of the places that keeps making Earth better, while research by Phil Metzger indicates that the business case for space-based data centers could become viable within a decade.
The implications stretch far beyond technology. Control of space-based compute infrastructure could influence the speed of thought and decision-making, while sovereign cloud data centers in orbit over international waters could have geopolitical implications.
Bezos’s prediction that gigawatt-scale computing could move off-planet within 20 years is starting to sound less sci-fi and more strategic. The next decade will determine whether orbital data centers become reality — or remain an expensive tech billionaire fantasy.
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