SpaceX, Blue Origin Heat Up Data Center Space Race

In space, no one can hear you stream. 

And that may be part of the allure for Big Tech companies looking to the heavens for their data center solutions.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are working on plans to launch orbital data centers that will host AI-computing payloads to offload rising terrestrial needs, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing anonymous sources familiar with the plans. 

A Blue Origin team has been working for more than a year on the technology needed for orbital AI data centers. Meanwhile, Musk's company is eyeing an upgrade to its Starlink satellites to allow SpaceX to host AI-computing data, the WSJ reports.

Blue Origin and SpaceX are just the latest tech players pursuing orbital data centers. 

Last month, satellite-provider Planet Labs and Google announced they would collaborate on Project Suncatcher, a program to launch two prototype satellites with Google AI chips on board for low-orbit AI data centers. The launch is scheduled for 2027.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt confirmed earlier this year that his acquisition of Relativity Space, an American aerospace company, was fueled in part to launch data centers into orbit.

This week, Nvidia-backed Starcloud announced it has been training its AI platform Gemma partly from a satellite laden with Nvidia H100 graphic chips orbiting the planet, CNBC reported. Both IBM’s Red Hat and Aetherflux are also working on orbiting data center plans.

And Sam Altman reportedly is seeking to invest in an upstart rocket maker to deploy orbital data centers for OpenAI’s use, the WSJ reported earlier this month.

Proponents say space may be the final and ideal frontier for data centers, untethered by terrestrial concerns of power consumption, Earth’s capricious weather patterns and NIMBY pushback.

“In the right orbit, a solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on earth, and produce power nearly continuously, reducing the need for batteries,” Google Senior Director Travis Beals said in a November blog post. “In the future, space may be the best place to scale AI compute.”

But experts warn that the operation of satellite data centers brings with it a host of challenges, including temperature management, radiation protection and the latency of transmitting data back to Earth.

And University of Michigan associate research scientist Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti warned earlier this month in The Conversation that orbital data centers also risk disaster from the floating trash left by defunct satellites and space junk.