Will data centers in space work? Elon Musk says yes : NPR
AFP via Getty Images and NASA/Collage by Emily Bogle/NPR
In front of a friendly crowd in March, Elon Musk laid out his plan for the future of his companies, and it was literally out of this world.
Musk announced that his space launch company, SpaceX, which had recently merged with his artificial intelligence company, xAI, would put data centers in orbit around Earth.
It all comes down to electricity, he explained. “Power on Earth is limited,” he said. “The space has the advantage of always being sunny.”
Musk imagines legions of data analysis satellites circling the planet, powering the AI revolution from above. This is the ideal pitch to take SpaceX public. This week, Bloomberg reported that the company had filed confidential documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission with the goal of having an IPO this summer.
Musk also says it makes financial sense. “I actually think the cost of deploying AI in space will fall below the cost of terrestrial AI much sooner than expected,” he said. “I think it might only take two or three years.”
Others are skeptical. Musk’s timeline is “an optimistic interpretation,” according to Brandon Lucia, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in installing computers on satellites. Napkin math sounds appealing, and the electricity there is free after all – but it turns out there are many obstacles to building a data center among the stars.
A global power problem
Here on Earth, the problem is glaring: AI is gobbling up electricity all over the world. Global data center power consumption is expected to double to nearly 1,000 terawatt hours by the end of the decade, according to an estimate from the International Energy Agency.
High-voltage transmission lines provide electricity to data centers in Ashburn, Virginia. Globally, data center electricity demand is expected to double by 2030.
Ted Shaffrey/AP
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Ted Shaffrey/AP
To fill this gap, some companies are building dedicated gas turbines, while others are investing in nuclear technology. That’s not enough, according to Philip Johnston, CEO and co-founder of Starcloud, which seeks to build orbital data centers.
“We’re very quickly facing constraints on where you can build new energy projects on land,” Johnston said. “Within six months, they will leave the chips in warehouses because they won’t have the electricity to turn them on.”
Starcloud launched its first spacecraft last fall with an Nvidia H100 chip on board. The company has demonstrated the ability to run a version of Google’s Gemini AI from space and plans to launch a second spacecraft in October. “This one produces 100 times more power than the first one,” Johnston said, although it is still only expected to generate about 8 kilowatts of power.
Google is also pursuing the idea of building data centers in space through a project known as Suncatcher. It plans to build a cluster of 81 satellites in partnership with satellite imaging company Planet. Two satellite prototypes will be launched in early 2027, according to the companies.
“Orbital data centers are an idea whose time has come,” Planet CEO Will Marshall wrote to NPR in an email. “When exactly it will be more cost-effective than land-based systems remains debatable, but now is the time to work on it.”
Everything must become bigger
Going from a handful of satellite prototypes to something useful isn’t that simple. On the one hand, the energy requirements of microchips used for artificial intelligence are enormous.
To get an idea of how much power is needed, consider the largest power generation facility in space today: the International Space Station (ISS).
The ISS’s solar panels are about half the size of a football field and produce about 100 kilowatts of average power, according to Olivier de Weck, a professor of astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s basically the amount of power produced by a single large car engine.”
To replicate a 100-megawatt data center in space would require an installation 500 to 1,000 times, depending on the orbit.
“Is it feasible? Yes, I think it is feasible, but not next year and certainly not in three years,” he said.
A slide from Elon Musk’s presentation shows his concept of an “AI Sat Mini” larger than SpaceX’s Starship rocket.
Screenshot by NPR/SpaceX
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Screenshot by NPR/SpaceX
And power is not the only requirement; satellites must also provide cooling for electronic chips. While it is true that space is cold, it is also a void. This means that when a satellite gets hot, there is no easy way to get rid of that heat: it just builds up.
“All this heat generated by the computer needs to be dissipated,” said Rebekah Reed, a former NASA official now at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
The best solution is radiators, which move liquids to giant panels where the heat can be dissipated. So, in addition to solar panels, an AI satellite would need another set of large radiators.
“When you couple these massive radiators with the massive solar panels needed for power and cooling, you’re actually talking about very large satellites, or very, very large constellations of satellites,” Reed said.
An alternative is to build smaller satellites and fly them in predefined formations called constellations. Such constellations help distribute heat and power problems, but to work, the satellites would have to send huge amounts of data back and forth. This likely means using lasers to transmit data between satellites. But even at the speed of light, the time it takes to transmit data from one satellite to another is long enough to slow down calculations.
Google’s Suncatcher project proposes flying groups of satellites in extremely tight clusters to reduce this latency. Musk, meanwhile, has proposed launching more than a million satellites and placing them in orbit around the Earth’s poles. He recently unveiled the first-generation “AI Sat Mini” spacecraft – with solar panels spanning about 180 meters (about 600 feet) – during his presentation.
Launching all of this into space would cost money – a lot of money. Currently, launching a satellite into orbit can cost around $1,000 per kilogram. Google estimates that the cost must be reduced by at least a factor of five, to $200 per kilogram, before data centers in space will start to make sense.
SpaceX’s Starship megarocket takes off on a test flight from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, on October 13, 2025. Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston says Starship is at the heart of building orbital data centers. He told investors: “If you don’t think Starship is going to work, don’t invest in us, it’s no problem.”
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Eric Gay/AP
Musk believes he can do this with his new Starship rocket, which is still in development. Starcloud’s Johnston says Starship is at the heart of much more than just SpaceX’s vision. He told investors: “If you don’t think Starship is going to work, don’t invest in us, it’s no problem.”
Server Upgrade
Even if a company could set up a data center in space, operating it would involve much more than just moving microchips into orbit.
Data centers on Earth aren’t just static buildings filled with buzzing chips, says Raul Martynek, CEO of DataBank, a company that runs 75 data centers, mostly in the United States. They require constant maintenance and upgrades, all done by workers.
Take DataBank’s IAD1 data center in Ashburn, Virginia. The facility spans 144,000 square feet and is filled with rows and rows of black computer cabinets filled with microprocessors. These installations are fairly mundane, but they still consume around 13 megawatts of energy at any given time (130 times more than the International Space Station).
“We have sellers here every day,” says James Mathes, who manages IAD1.
Workers are constantly moving in and out of these data centers, installing new servers, upgrading microchips, and repairing things. And to stay competitive, space data centers would have to do much of the same.
Some of this could be done through software, and Musk points out that the chips can be rigorously tested in the field before being sent aloft. But the fact remains that companies that rent data centers often want physical access to them for one reason or another.
Martynek, who spent decades in telecommunications, says he doesn’t worry about space data centers taking business away from his company.
“It seems like there are a lot of ifs and a lot of progress to be made, and I find it hard to believe that all of this can happen in two or three years,” he said. “No one in the data center world loses sleep.”
Contact Geoff Brumfiel at signal at gbrumfiel.13
