Why tech companies are racing to put AI data centers in space

Why on earth do people want to put data centers in space? It’s all about power and cooling. The chips that run AI models require a lot of electrical power, and our electrical grid will be seriously stretched to accommodate the wave of new AI data centers now being built or planned. Data centers, in fact, will account for almost half of U.S. electricity demand growth between now and 2030. In space, there’s ample solar power for running AI servers. In the right orbit, solar energy is effectively continuous and more powerful than on Earth. Solar panels can collect about eight times as much energy in space as they can on Earth, and they need little battery storage. That means no need for the terrestrial power grid, which will be challenged to accommodate the data center power demand of the future. The output of AI models running on the chips can then be beamed down to Earth by laser or radio. Proponents of orbiting data centers believe early test flights are the start of “solar-powered compute swarms.” The orbital compute idea gained steam last year when Jeff Bezos said during a fireside chat in Italy that data centers “will be better built in space, because we have solar power there,…

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