Comment by n_u
8 hours ago
A former NASA engineer with a PhD in space electronics who later worked at Google for 10 years wrote an article about why datacenters in space are very technically challenging:
https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
I don't have any specialized knowledge of the physics but I saw an article suggesting the real reason for the push to build them in space is to hedge against political pushback preventing construction on Earth.
I can't find the original article but here is one about datacenter pushback:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-08-20/ai-and...
But even if political pushback on Earth is the real reason, it still seems datacenters in space are extremely technically challenging/impossible to build.
The real reason is, Elon has SpaceX and xAI. He can create an illusion of synergy and orders of magnitude advancements to boost the market cap and pocket all the money. He realized long time ago you don't need to deliver to play the market cap game, in fact it's better if you are selling a story far in the future rather than a something you can deliver now.
We don’t even have a habitable structure in space when the ISS falls, there is no world in which space datacenters are a thing in the next 10, I’d argue even 30 years. People really need to ground themselves in reality.
Edit: okay Tiangong - but that is not a data center.
Who is “we”? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station
Good point. Still a long, long way from data centers.
I don't think any of the companies that say they are working on space data centers intend them to be habitable.
> We don’t even have a habitable structure in space
Silicon is way more forgiving than biology. This isn’t an argument for this proposal. But there is no technical connection between humans in space and data centers other than launch-cost synergies.
Okay, but a human being represents what, 200 W of power? The ISS has a crew of 3, so that's less than a beefy single user AI workstation at full tilt. If the question is whether it's practical to put 1-2 kW worth of computing power in orbit, the answer is obviously yes, but somehow I don't think that's what's meant by "datacenter in space".
We also don't have fully reusable launch vehicles, yet. But we will shortly. That will decrease the cost of launch by at least an order of magnitude.
Still there will be a lot of engineering problems to solve.
2-3 years seems very short, but 10 years seems long to me.
I don't know, 10 years seems reasonable for development. There's not that much new technology that needs to be developed. Cooling and communications would just require minor changes to existing designs. Other systems may be able to be lifted wholesale with minimal integration. I think if there were obstacles to building data centers on the ground then we might see them in orbit within the next ten years.
I don't see those obstacles appearing though.
The same things you are saying about data centers in space was said by similar people 10-15 years ago when Elon musk said SpaceX would have a man on Mars in 10-15 years.
We have had the tech to do it since the 90's, we just needed to invest into it.
Same thing with Elon Musks hyperloop, aka the atmospheric train (or vactrain) which has been an idea since 1799! And how far has Elon Musks boring company come to building even a test loop?
Yeah, in theory you could build a data center in space. But unless you have a background in the limitations of space engineering/design brings, you don't truly understand what you are saying. A single AI data center server rack takes up the same energy load of 0.3 to 1 international space station. So by saying Elon musk can reasonable achieve this, is wild to anyone who has done any engineering work with space based tech. Every solar panel generates heat, the racks generate heat, the data communication system generates, heat... Every kW of power generated and every kW of power consumes needs a radiator. And it's not like water cooling, you are trying to radiate heat off into a vacuum. That is a technical challenge and size, the amount of tons to orbit needed to do this... Let alone outside of low earth... Its a moonshot project for sure. And like I said above, Elon musk hasnt really followed through with any of his moonshots.
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Ok then short SpaceX stock when it IPOs.
“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” - John Maynard Keynes
What does stock price have to do with anything?
That someone could put a data center in space for the price of 100 years of eliminating world hunger doesn’t mean shit.
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Why would you short the stock?
If you're hellbent on arguing with a cult, it will be much cheaper to go down to your local Church of Scientology and try to convince them that their e-meter doesn't work.
As if company performance actually affected stock price when it comes to anything Elon Musk touches.
For fuck's sake, TSLA has a P/E of a whopping *392*. There is zero justification for how overvalued that stock is. In a sane world, I should be able to short it and 10x my money, but people are buying into Musk's hype on FSD, Robotaxi, and whatever the hell robot they're making. Even if you expected them to be successes, they'd need to 20x the company's entire revenue to justify the current market cap.
It's much easier to find a country or jurisdiction that doesn't care about a bunch of data centers vs launching them into space.
I don't get why we aren't building mixed use buildings, maybe the first floor can be retail and restaurants, the next two floors can be data centers, and then above that apartments.
In Switzerland infomaniak built a data center under apartments and DC heat is used for heating. There are some videos about it.
Americans have trouble understanding something like that. We believe anything short of a 3bdrm house with a lawn and backyard is communism.
I'd love to live in a dense city. My office within waking distance. A Cafe in my apartment building, etc.
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Probably for the same reasons they aren't doing mixed use prison and restaurant buildings.
What you don't want to live near the newest poisonous abomination that the whiz kids dreamt up? Do you want China to take over America or something?
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Mixed-use buildings with restaurants on the lower floors and residential on the upper floors are very common. Not sure what prisons have to do with anything.
Nice article, the first one. I hope they try it, burn many billions of cash, and then fail. I also hope they don't spread radioactive material across the whole atmosphere when failing, though.
It's not just "very challenging", it's "very challenging and also solves no actual problem we face".
> A former NASA engineer with a PhD in space electronics who later worked at Google for 10 years wrote an article about why datacenters in space are very technically challenging
It's curious that we live in a world in which I think the majority of people somehow think this ISN'T complicated.
Like, have we long since reached the point where technology is suitably advanced to average people that it seems like magic, where people can almost literally propose companies that just "conjure magic" and the average person thinks that's reasonable?
It's just the thought process that comes with shallow understanding:
you can’t tell me the microwave isn’t magic. it’s magic.
I can put things in a box that uses spooky electromagnetic waves to tickle water molecules to the point that they get hot and maybe boil off, given the chance? Sounds like magic to me
Google is currently working on AI data centers in space.
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/research/go...
It's not like launching stuff into space doesn't have pushback, either. See: starlink satellites.
"Technically challenging", a nice way to say "impossible"
Just like rockets landing themselves
No, rockets landing themselves is just controlling the mechanism you use to have them take off, and builds on trust vectoring technology from 1970s jet fighters based on sound physics.
Figuring out how to radiate a lot of waste heat into a vacuum is fighting physics. Ordinarily we use a void on earth as a very effective _insulator_ to keep our hot drinks hot.
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He said impossible, this was done recently, by spacex themselves.
Yeah but he’s an expert his opinion can be dismissed bro this is 2026
> It(Solar) works, but it isn't somehow magically better than installing solar panels on the ground
Umm, if this is the point, I don't know whether to take rest of author's arguments seriously. Solar only works certain time of the day and certain period of year on land.
Also there is so limited calculations for the numbers in the article, while the article throws of numbers left and right.
> Solar only works certain time of the day and certain period of year on land
The same goes for LEO!
Most space datacenter plan plans to use sun-synchronous orbit.
No one is interested in excuses on why it can't be done. Were in interested in the plan on how they plan to do it.
The guy is saying satellite communication is restricted to 1Gbps ffs. SpaceX is way past that.