Tech billionaires have been obsessed with space for a long time. Now, as the largest AI companies race to build more data centers in a frenzied pursuit of profitability, space is looking less like a pet project and more like a commercial opportunity. In 2025 alone, six proposals for giant AI data centers needing multiple gigawatts of power — a capacity only rumored of in 2024 — have been announced. Earthlings are catching on to the fact that power-hungry data centers take up land and water, while providing few jobs, too much pollution, and rising electricity costs.
Hence the idea to put the data centers in orbit around the Earth, not on the Earth. Space-based data centers — in the form of satellites with solar panels — are Big Tech’s latest fad and Silicon Valley’s newest investable venture. In space, they theorize, the sun’s unlimited rays could provide endless amounts of energy to power your latest AI-generated Sora video. But it’s not likely to be that easy.
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO and current CEO of startup Relativity Space), have all recently expanded the focus of their rocket companies to include space data centers. Startups exclusively focused on this idea, like the US-based Aetherflux, have laid out deployment plans. Others have snagged partnerships with big names, like Planet’s partnership with Google and Nvidia’s backing of Starcloud, which launched a satellite containing H100 GPUs in November as part of the latest SpaceX mission. Earlier this year, China launched a dozen supercomputer satellites that can process data in space. Europe wants in on the action too — one European think tank called space data centers the next “rapidly emerging opportunity.”
Yet, scientists who study space remain skeptical of the idea. Astronomer Jonathan McDowell has been tracking every object launched into space since the late 1980s. He told The Verge that, unsurprisingly, it is very expensive to launch something into space. Many business ventures, he said, start from the idea that “‘space is cool, let’s do something in space,’ rather than, ‘we really need to be in space to do this.’”
“As the number of spacecraft increases, you have to dodge more often, so you have to use more fuel.”
The main perk of orbital data centers is access to free, limitless solar power when traveling around the Earth from pole to pole in the sun-synchronous orbit. (Musk’s Starlink satellites, in contrast, avoid the poles and stick close to paying customers around the planet’s populated middle.) The centers would have to remain in low Earth orbit around 600 to 1,000 miles up from the ground in order to communicate without very large antennas.
In November, Google laid out plans for a sun-synchronous low Earth orbital data center called Project Suncatcher, which is slated to kick off in early 2027 with a launch of two prototype satellites. Ultimately, Google says there could be 81 satellites, each carrying TPU chips, traveling together in an arranged cluster one kilometer-square in size. Only 100 to 200 meters would separate each satellite. (For context, typical GPS and Starlink satellites move around individually, not in 81-unit fleets.) Whereas wires connect GPUs together on Earth, Google plans to connect the TPU chips with inter-satellite lasers.
Some experts say it would not be smooth sailing, however. The group of satellites would need to travel through millions of pieces of space debris, or “a minefield of random objects, each moving at 17,000 miles an hour,” Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti, associate research scientist of space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan, explained to The Verge. This space debris is especially concentrated in popular orbits like the Sun-synchronous orbit. This is why Google’s plan is looking, well, “a little iffy,” he said. Dodging each object requires a tiny propulsion to move out of the way. For context, Akhavan-Tafti wrote in a recent Fortune article that the approximately 8,300 Starlink satellites made over 140,000 such maneuvers in just the first half of 2025. Given the close proximity of each satellite in Google’s plan, Akhavan-Tafti thinks that the entire constellation, rather than each individual satellite, would need to move out of the way of any incoming debris. “That’s really the big challenge,” he said.
Similarly, McDowell says that a group of 81 satellites traveling together just 100 to 200 meters apart would be “unprecedented” — typically only two or three, maybe four, spacecraft would travel that close together. The size and closeness present “concerning failure modes.” “If a thruster gets stuck, stuck on, or fails, and now you’ve got a rogue one in among all the others in this cluster of 81,” he explains.
However, Jessica Bloom, an astrophysicist on Google’s Project Suncatcher, told The Verge that the group of 81 satellites is “illustrative,” for now, because the final number will depend on money and results from preliminary tests scheduled for 2027. Regardless, satellites can move individually or as a group to avoid debris, Bloom said, and the closeness of the traveling satellites is the most novel part of Google’s plan.
Bloom explained that the satellites will orbit at the same speed relative to each other, and “relative velocity, rather than proximity, is the key risk factor for damage from impact between objects,” she said. “We take our responsibility to the space environment extremely seriously; our approach prioritizes space sustainability and compliance with both current and emerging rules to minimize risk from debris in orbit,” Bloom said.
In addition to the bones of old satellites, the number of new spacecraft in orbit has dramatically increased over the last few years. There are now more than 14,000 active satellites, roughly two-thirds of which are Starlink, as tracked by McDowell. “As the number of spacecraft increases, you have to dodge more often, so you have to use more fuel,” he said. This presents a circular problem: More fuel means a bigger spacecraft, which is a bigger object for other spacecraft to dodge, which means it’s more likely to contribute to space debris.
Space data centers also have to contend with the uniquely extraterrestrial problem of getting rid of heat in a vacuum. Philip Johnston, CEO of Nvidia-backed startup Starcloud, told The Verge that his company dissipates heat from large infrared panels. In order to keep the electronics safe from radiation, Johnston said they stripped the Nvidia H100 GPU “down to the basics” and shielded the electronics with tungsten, lead, and aluminium, among other materials that are dense and lightweight.
But infrared radiation also has the potential to interfere with telescopes, according to John Barentine of the advocacy group the Center for Space Environmentalism. The group has not come out for or against space data centers, Barentine said, but they are concerned about the impact of potential light pollution from reflective surfaces on the spacecraft on astronomy research. Space companies often classify those spacecraft details as “trade secrets,” leading to a “chicken-and-egg situation right now,” Barentine said. “We can’t really say with a lot of certainty what the impacts will be because we don’t know the details because the companies haven’t or won’t disclose them.”
Starcloud’s Johnston said their satellites will never be visible in the night sky, only when the Sun is just about to appear or just after it’s set. “You can’t really do astronomy at dawn or dusk, anyway,” Johnston said.
“That is not entirely true,” McDowell, who has worked for 37 years as an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told The Verge. “There are things that we do need to observe at dawn and dusk, particularly things near the sun, like asteroids that might be coming close to the Earth — which we really don’t want to miss,” he said.
“How do we keep low Earth orbit open for business for generations to come?”
Practically, data centers on Earth require regular maintenance to keep the racks of chips humming along, and trained human operators are already in short supply. Repairs of satellites in space, meanwhile, don’t happen. Astronauts fix telescopes and equipment attached to the International Space Station or NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The prospect of robots reorienting or refueling satellites in orbit is theoretically possible but rare.
Despite earthly wariness from astronomers outside Big Tech, the popularity of space data centers is likely to continue for years and even decades. Both Google and startup Aetherflux plan to launch satellites in early 2027. Starcloud plans to launch its second satellite in October 2026 and then “ramp up production in 2027, 2028,” Johnston said. He views SpaceX as Starcloud’s main competitor, despite no official mention from Musk’s company on when a space data center might be launched, only a post on X from Musk about SpaceX “simply scaling up Starlink V3 satellites” to achieve this. Blue Origin has reportedly been working on space data centers for over a year but has also not publicly commented on any plans.
Constellations close to Earth present good opportunities for “trying to make life better here back on Earth,” space scientist Akhavan-Tafti said. But it needs to be done in a sustainable way: “How do we keep low Earth orbit open for business for generations to come?”
One option? Avoid launching more stuff into orbit, according to Seth Gladstone of Food & Water Watch, the environmental group leading a petition to halt data center construction. “Why is it that Big Tech always seems to think a solution to its many Earth-bound problems is to blast more stuff into space?”
