Data Centers in Orbit Could Make a Lot of Sense

At first, it seemed like an outlandish idea.

The former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, was recently involved in acquiring the startup Relativity Space. He suggested that this acquisition aims to put data centers in orbit.

Data centers in outer space? Really?

If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. First, there is currently a rapidly increasing demand for computing capacity, mainly linked to AI developments, and this (presently unmet) demand for electricity to power AI data centers.

Several projects are underway to meet the demand for electricity, such as Google and Microsoft’s proposal for nuclear plants. In particular, Google decided to develop three project sites for advanced reactors, each generating at least 600 megawatts of power capacity. Ten-gigawatt data centers will soon become common. However, the energy costs will be in the trillions, and the environmental impact of these projects is a threat that is hard to ignore.

I recently grabbed a copy of the McKinsey report “The cost of compute: A $7 trillion race to scale data centers.” Just from the title, you get the gist of what’s inside.

Just consider the following terrifying projections:

• By 2030, computing power demand will require an investment of $6.7 trillion.

• $5.2 trillion will be specifically for AI workloads (most of it!).

• 25% of data center costs (that is, 1.7 trillion) will go to power and cooling (“energizers”).

There are basically two aspects of AI data centers’ operation that have a huge environmental impact (the “energizers” mentioned above:

1. Electricity production for feeding the data center.

2. Dissipation of the heat produced while running AI processes.

Yes, heat dissipation is as essential as electricity production. In fact, as data centers don’t store energy, all of the electricity they use is ultimately dissipated as heat.

A big data center dissipates as much as 50 MW and above to the environment. All the time, generally. In a year, that’s 438,000 MWh of heat dissipated. That’s nuts, to the point that we struggle to comprehend figures as astronomical as these.

Now, imagine aggregating the heat generated by all data centers worldwide in a year. Your head exploded, didn’t it?

All that generated heat gets added to an already stressed environment.

That’s a recipe for disaster.

Putting data centers in orbit

In this context, a solar-powered data center in orbit looks like a feasible alternative: its gigantic solar panels would be deployed without taking up any real estate on Earth.

Further, solar panels in space can get 24/7 insolation, not just during the day, assuming properly designed orbits. And the sun is never behind a cloudy sky.

Now, consider how to handle the 438,000 MWh of heat produced by one data center in a year. In space, all the heat produced by the data center would be radiated to outer space instead of heating our planet. That’s it. Gone. No air conditioning, nothing but passive infrared radiators.

Wouldn’t that be great?

Putting data centers in orbit would take care, without any environmental damage to the planet, of the two aspects I mentioned above:

• Electricity production is done with the solar panels deployed in space.

• Heat is radiated to outer space, and in a way, disappears.

I’m considering only low-orbit satellites because otherwise, data communications would have a high latency, making them unsuitable for interactive applications. Regarding bandwidth, a typical capacity of tens to hundreds of Gbps would be enough for non-interactive AI tasks such as AI training.

In fact, AI training is one of the best tasks a data center in orbit could tackle, as data transfers are low compared to the internal computing work.

Now it’s time to address the elephant in the room: how do you put a data center in orbit? How much would it take?

Not easy questions.

The cost of launching it all

However, consider that Relativity Space, the company Eric Schmidt bought (as I mentioned at the top of this post), is not a data center company. It’s an aerospace startup developing the “Terran R rocket” (you can watch a 45-minute video about it here).

Of course, having the rockets to launch data center modules into space doesn’t mean it makes economic sense. We have to understand that, for a data center in orbit, most costs, both financial and environmental, are initial costs, not ongoing costs.

How much does it cost to put a load in orbit? The Terran R rocket is supposed to cost $3,000/kg, so a ton of load would cost several million.

How many tons does a data center weigh? A large data center is estimated to weigh several thousand tons, so the launching cost goes into the billions.

I assume that space-oriented data centers wouldn’t be exactly like ground-based ones. First, they wouldn’t have air-conditioning equipment (perhaps the heaviest part of data centers), just passive heat radiating parts. Second, many of the metallic parts in a data center are intended to support the weight of computer boxes. But there is no gravity out there, so the computer racks would be redesigned to be light.

In the end, adding up the cost of the data center computers, solar panels, and associated equipment, and the launch into orbit of all of it, we are talking about tens of billions per data center.

Summing it up