You can’t solve your AI anxiety by blocking the Data Center nearby.
They’ll just build it in the next county, the next State, in Tierra del Fuego, under the Ocean, or in Space.
This week, a first test bed satellite was launched to begin solving problems related to space based Data Centers. Google thinks they will be economically viable in the mid 2030s.
And don’t think that they’re just going to make humanity extinct in 5 years. We’re not getting off that easy.
We’re going to have to step up and figure this problem out with the right kind of guard rails and international agreements, and the path to doing that starts in next month’s election.
Google’s prototype of its orbital compute satellite took off today onboard a SpaceX rocket launched from California — the first time the tech giant has sent one of its advanced chips into space.
Once commissioned, the satellite will fire up its TPU in 15-minute bursts to avoid straining the satellite’s power and thermal management systems. This satellite is based on a standard platform built by Planet Labs, but the two companies are working on a demo expected to take flight next year that will see two satellites more purpose-built for advanced compute that can run more substantial workloads. Those future versions will attempt to collaborate via a laser communications link.
“You can’t solve your AI anxiety by blocking the Data Center nearby.”
Strawman. No one would think that. In the case of those concerned about broad social impacts from AI (oh, we blocked a local data center, now AI won’t happen), and most people who protest data centers near them are doing so because they worry about local noise, impacts to electrical and water availability, pollution with centers that have on-site gas turbines, massive tax breaks to the centers, and so on. Blocking centers in those cases DOES solve their AI anxiety.
I’d be very much in favor of an international agreement that only allows data centers in space. Preferably, solar powered and on the moon.
Agree about elections, including the one in a month, but it’s clear that Trump is going all in on not regulating the industry nationally or internationally for the next 2 years.
Well I listened to the Planet Labs guy wildly oversell and then set up a ground-based straw man argument that using solar on the ground to power data centers wouldn’t work unless you added “complexity” by which he referenced putting batteries into the mix. And he completely left out the more realistic comparison: Greening our grid would mean power demand would be supplied without countless launches putting exhaust and re-entry debris into the stratosphere and higher, affecting chemistry in areas we still haven’t deeply studied (because it’s hard studying below orbit but above most of the atmosphere).
He also skips the enormous, and constant, demand to keep launching even after the millions of satellites are deployed, because it will take years and because data center gear is obsolete very quickly.
Then he also skips mentioning that data centers on the ground can be maintained with equipment swaps, and (and this is important) all the precious metals and aluminum and all the minerals in the solar panels, circuit boards, chips, are fully recyclable when they stay down here on the ground. After launch, they would simply add new and novel mixes of burned up debris particulates in the upper atmosphere.
Are data centers in space possible? Yes. It’s also possible to do tons of other things that are harmful, useless or best done a different way. Using more fossil fuels (SpaceX’s current main fuels are kerosene or methane) to launch vast amounts of material into space to pump a data center bubble, in part as a way to evade regulations, at a time when the US, Russia and China (at a minimum) have tested weapons in space? When these data centers would disproportionately benefit one of the three, and regulations up there are as thin as the atmosphere?
Can you guess I’m not a fan? Several have noticed that non-humanitarian Elon Musk stands to own even more of the planet’s overall wealth as his space launch/ai company is the one positioned to profit from pushing the data center bubble up over our heads.
IEEE pieces on the topic:
The Space-based Data Center Hype Machine Is Already in Orbit Why the stars—and the math—won’t align for space compute anytime soonHarry Goldstein01 Jul 2026
https://spectrum.ieee.org/orbital-data-center-hype
Why Orbital Data Centers Are Harder Than Silicon Valley Thinks
Shedding heat will require ingenious new designs
Andrew Cavalier11 Jun 2026
https://spectrum.ieee.org/orbital-data-centers-heat
Thanks for the IEEE links. Always a reality check.