Editor’s note: This is the first of three feature articles Ars is publishing to explore the financial, technical, and competitive dimensions of orbital data centers. Although the idea of putting data centers into space has long been discussed on a theoretical basis, the technology has rapidly become a red-hot topic.
This series will attempt to ground-truth some of the rhetoric flying around. This first installment takes a look at the core economic argument surrounding orbital datacenters; subsequent articles will explore detailed cost modeling at scale, the technical challenges involved, and the landscape of competitors.
Let’s start with the basics. What, exactly, is an orbital data center?
On the ground, data centers are typically large, warehouse-sized facilities filled with racks of storage and servers, and usually some high-speed networking gear to connect everything. A data center can be small or large, but the ones SpaceX is looking to supplant are of the big kind—the ones operated by major industry players like Amazon Web Services and Google, which provide most of the online services you use today. These are sprawling buildings, or even campuses of buildings, with redundant connections to the electrical grid, on-site generators, massive banks of batteries, and enormous cooling systems to handle the heat being shed by thousands upon thousands of machines operating around the clock.
An orbital data center replicates all of that, but in space.
Instead of being stored in 19-inch racks, the individual server elements would instead be built around— and attached to—a “satellite bus.” This is a spacecraft with large solar arrays to gather energy, thermal systems to manage heat (in a vacuum, heat must be radiated away), propulsion for orbit-keeping and maneuvering, and high-bandwidth communications gear. And it is not a theoretical idea. A company called Starcloud recently modified and launched an Nvidia H100 GPU to a small satellite bus where it is running Gemini in space.
Credit:
Nathan Howard/Getty Images
An Amazon Web Services data center is shown situated near single-family homes on July 17, 2024, in Stone Ridge, Virginia.
Credit:
Nathan Howard/Getty Images
There’s a catch, though. Replicating the output of even a single large terrestrial data center would require, at a minimum, hundreds of these satellites.
Historically, building things in space has been enormously expensive. The International Space Station, which has about the same amount of habitable space as the average American home, cost more than $150 billion to construct in space. That’s on the order of 1 million times more than the cost of building a single-family home. Until recently, it cost $10,000 to put a single kilogram of payload into orbit, but costs can now be as low as one-third of that.
Leave a Reply