Space may soon find itself populated with data centers from Earth and at the forefront of this achievement may be Google. “Obviously, it’s a moonshot,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on the “Google AI: Release Notes” podcast this week.
Pichai acknowledged that the notion seems “crazy” today, but “when you truly step back and envision the amount of compute we’re going to need, it starts making sense and it’s a matter of time.”
A data center is a specialized facility that houses computer systems, storage devices, and networking equipment used to store, process, and manage digital data. It contains servers, storage systems, routers, switches, and security devices, all supported by reliable power supplies and cooling systems to ensure continuous operation.
Data centers power cloud services, websites, streaming platforms, enterprise IT operations, and big data analytics, making them the backbone of modern digital infrastructure. They can be owned by a single company (enterprise), rented out as colocation space, or operated by cloud providers like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft.
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Essentially, data centers are the physical “engine rooms” of the internet, enabling organizations and individuals to access and process data reliably and at scale.
Pichai was referring to “Project Suncatcher,” a new long-term research bet that Google announced in November. “Maybe we’ll meet a Tesla Roadster,” he quipped.
Other tech giants have also chimed in on this with Tesla CEO Elon Musk writing in an X post, “Starship should be able to deliver around 300 GW per year of solar-powered AI satellites to orbit, maybe 500 GW. The ‘per year’ part is what makes this such a big deal.”
“I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told comedian and podcaster Theo Von in a July interview. “But I don’t know, because maybe we put them in space. Like maybe we build a big Dyson sphere on the solar system and say, ‘Hey, it actually makes no sense to put these on Earth.'”
“The lowest cost place for data centers is space,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff wrote in a post on X earlier this month, referring to a video clip of Musk touting the benefits of orbital AI at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum earlier this month.
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“The sun only receives roughly one, two billionth of the sun’s energy,” Musk said at the event. “So, if you want to have something that is, say, a million times more energy than Earth could possibly produce, you must go into space. This is where it’s kind of handy to have a space company.”
The discussions by tech leaders suggest that the future of computing and data centers could extend far beyond Earth, reflecting both the increasing demand for computational power and the creative approaches companies are exploring to meet it. Concepts such as orbital or lunar data centers, solar-powered AI satellites, and even megastructures like Dyson spheres illustrate how space may become a frontier for innovation in digital infrastructure, though their feasibility remains highly speculative.
While these ideas may seem ambitious or speculative today, they highlight the pressures driving technological advancement on Earth and the lengths companies are willing to explore for scalable, low-cost, and energy-efficient solutions. At the same time, this vision underscores the continuing importance of conventional data centers, which remain the backbone of current cloud services, enterprise computing, and digital operations. Whether on Earth or in space, the timeline, scale, and practical impact of such space-based data centers remain uncertain.