Artificial intelligence increasingly requires so much space and power that we may run out of both on Earth. As a solution, tech companies are looking to do business in space by creating celestial data centers that harness solar power. But while doing so demands less cooling, it could create other costs and ecological problems.
Data in the sky with diamonds
The enormous amount of data artificial intelligence requires has led to the building of data centers across the country. These systems “account for nearly half of U.S. electricity demand growth between now and 2030,” said Scientific American. And their “global power requirements could double by the end of this decade as companies train larger AI models.” Tech giants, including Amazon, Google, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, are “running into physical limits to their AI ambitions on Earth,” said The Verge.
Orbital data centers would “benefit from continuous solar energy, generated by arrays of photovoltaic cells,” said Benjamin Lee, a computer architect and an engineer at the University of Pennsylvania, to Scientific American. A move to space could “resolve long-standing challenges around powering data center computation in a carbon-efficient manner.”
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The sun’s rays can be “direct and constant for solar panels to collect,” with “no clouds, no rainstorms, no nighttime,” said The Wall Street Journal. “Demands for cooling could also be cut because of the vacuum of space.”
“The race for artificial general intelligence is fundamentally a race for compute capacity and, by extension, energy,” said Baiju Bhatt, the founder and CEO of Aetherflux, another company working toward space-based computing, in a press release. “The elephant in the room is that our current energy plans simply won’t get us there fast enough.”
One giant leap for AI
While space data centers could potentially curb some of the environmental problems associated with earthbound ones, there are several barriers. “Like any moonshot, it’s going to require us to solve a lot of complex engineering challenges,” said Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google parent company Alphabet, in a post on X.
Launch costs have “decreased over the years,” but it is “still prohibitively expensive to launch and operate these things in space,” said The Verge. Space-based computing will “not become cost-effective unless rocket launch costs decline substantially,” said Scientific American. Experts also warn that these systems could have “even bigger environmental and climate effects than their earthly counterparts.”
Having data centers “visible in the night sky at dawn or dusk” presents a problem because some observers “rely on twilight to hunt for near-Earth asteroids,” said Scientific American. Also, it could worsen the space junk problem, as “more hardware is launched and more debris and fragments fall back through the atmosphere.”
