[n_u]

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.

[bgnn]

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.

[dubeye]

both can be true, he can excel at 'narrative' and also deliver me my Tesla and my starlink, it's not either or

[andruby]

exactly. This smells like a way to boost the SpaceX IPO to meme-stock premiums

[dartharva]

What'd be the point of inflating market caps like this when it's obvious they'll crash the moment the owner tries to liquidate any of it before the promises are kept?

[jstummbillig]

I don't understand the claim. SpaceX is literally delivering? And I don't think there is any delusion about that being optional.

[taurath]

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.

[nickff]

Who is “we”? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station

[tzs]

I don't think any of the companies that say they are working on space data centers intend them to be habitable.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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.

[IX-103]

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.

[rlt]

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.

[TheBlight]

Ok then short SpaceX stock when it IPOs.

[999900000999]

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.

[TrackerFF]

I think data centers, in the areas where they are most relevant (cold climates), are going to face an uphill battle in the near future.

Where I live, Norway, we've seen that:

1) The data centers don't generate the numbers of jobs they promise. Sure, during building phase, they do generate a lot of business, but during operations and maintenance phase, not so much. Typically these companies will promise hundreds of long-term jobs, while in reality that number is only a fraction.

2) They are extremely power hungry, to the point where households can expect to see their utility bill go up a non-trivial amount. That's for a single data center. In the colder climate areas where data centers are being promoted, power infrastructure might not be able to handle the centers (something seen in northern Norway, for example) at a larger scale, due to decades of stagnation.

3) The environmental effects have come more under scrutiny. And, unfortunately for the companies owning data centers, pretty much all cold-climate western countries have stringent environmental laws.

[kuon]

In Switzerland infomaniak built a data center under apartments and DC heat is used for heating. There are some videos about it.

[SecretDreams]

Probably for the same reasons they aren't doing mixed use prison and restaurant buildings.

[wat10000]

The cost per square foot goes up as you add more floors. Construction goes multi-story to save space where land is expensive. But data centers don't need to be in places where land is expensive.

[tech_ken]

> 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.

I mean a DC needs a lot of infrastructure and space. I think the real estate economics in places where people want to live, shop, and eat preclude the kinds of land usage common in DC design. Keep in mind that most DCs are actually like 4 or 5 datahalls tethered together with massive fiber optic networks.

Also people prefer to build parking in those levels that you're proposing to put DCs into.

[bandrami]

It's not just "very challenging", it's "very challenging and also solves no actual problem we face".

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> 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?

[jitl]

you can’t tell me the microwave isn’t magic. it’s magic.

[solid_fuel]

It's just the thought process that comes with shallow understanding:

    "I can buy a server"
    "We can put things in space"
    "What do you mean I can't get a server in space?!"

[spikels]

Google is currently working on AI data centers in space.

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/research/go...

[sejje]

It's not like launching stuff into space doesn't have pushback, either. See: starlink satellites.

[Ajedi32]

I was skeptical at first for much the same reason the author of that first article is; there are a lot of obstacles. But the more I think about it the less daunting those obstacles seem.

The author uses the power capacity of the ISS's solar panels as a point of comparison, but SpaceX has already successfully deployed many times that capacity in Starlink satellites[1] without even needing to use Starship, and obviously the heat dissipation problem for those satellites has already been solved so there's little point in hand-wringing about that.

The author also worries about ground communication bandwidth, claiming it is "difficult to get much more than about 1Gbps reliably", which seems completely ignorant of the fact that Starlink already has a capacity much greater than that.

The only unsolved technical challenge I see in that article is radiation tolerance. It's unclear how big of a problem that will actually be in practice. But SpaceX probably has more experience with that than anyone other than perhaps NASA so if they think it can be done I don't see much reason to doubt them.

Ultimately I think this is doable from a technical perspective, it's just a question of whether it will be economical. Traditional wisdom would say no even just due to launch costs, but if SpaceX can get Starship working reliably that could alter the equation a lot. We'll see. This could turn out to be a boondoggle, or it could be the next Starlink. The prospect of 24/7 solar power with no need for battery storage or ground infrastructure does seem tempting.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/zzwpue/with_starlin...

[tech_ken]

> The author uses the power capacity of the ISS's solar panels as a point of comparison, but SpaceX has already successfully deployed many times that capacity in Starlink satellites[1] without even needing to use Starship,

Your link here isn't really a fair comparison, and also you're still short a factor of 10x. Starlink has deployed 50x the ISS's solar cap across its entire fleet (admittedly 3 years ago); the author's calcs are 500x the ISS for one datacenter.

> and obviously the heat dissipation problem for those satellites has already been solved so there's little point in hand-wringing about that.

This reasoning doesn't make any sense to me, the heat dissipation issues seem very much unresolved. A single Starlink satellite is using power in the order of watts, a datacenter is hitting like O(1/10) of gigawatts. The heat dissipation problem is literally orders of magnitude more difficult for each DC than for their current fleet. This is like saying that your gaming PC will never overheat because NetGear already solved heat dissipation in their routers.

> The author also worries about ground communication bandwidth, claiming it is "difficult to get much more than about 1Gbps reliably", which seems completely ignorant of the fact that Starlink already has a capacity much greater than that.

Don't their current satellites have like 100Gbps capacity max? Do you have any idea how many 100Gbps routers go into connecting a single datacenter to the WAN? Or to each other (since intrahall model training is table stakes these days). They have at most like O(1)Pbps across their entire fleet (based on O(10K) satellites deployed and assuming they have no failover protection). They would need to entirely abandon their consumer base and use their entire fleet to support up/down + interconnections for just 2 or 3 datacenters. They would basically need to redeploy a sizeable chunk of their entire fleet every time they launched a DC.

[YetAnotherNick]

> 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.

[jhanschoo]

> Solar only works certain time of the day and certain period of year on land

The same goes for LEO!

[lpcvoid]

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.

[edhelas]

"Technically challenging", a nice way to say "impossible"

[boxedemp]

Just like rockets landing themselves

[moomoo11]

Yeah but he’s an expert his opinion can be dismissed bro this is 2026

[jaimex2]

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.