A common response to the rapidly accelerating data center construction in the United States has been, “Not in my backyard.” So tech moguls are proposing taking their business somewhere else, where no one lives — outer space.
But is it possible? Maybe, but it would come with a vast set of challenges.
One of the biggest complaints surrounding data centers is their strain on the power grid, resulting in a spike in utility bills. In space, that wouldn’t be an issue, thanks to solar power. After that, it starts to get more complicated and expensive.
“Putting, like pretty much anything, any kind of satellite or any kind of equipment in space is pretty much always going to be harder than doing it on Earth,” said Andrew Yoon, a software engineer with CivAI, a nonprofit that educates the public about AI’s capabilities with interactive software experiences. “So the cost equation here is very, very difficult.”
Working against orbital data centers is all the radiation in space.
“We are protected by the Earth’s atmosphere from all kinds of radiation that comes from outer space,” Yoon said. “This radiation damages electrical equipment. It can also do things like cause spurious memory errors, where a bit on your computer will just flip from zero to one kind of randomly.”
He said in those random instances, AI could answer a prompt incorrectly or break the trial run of a new platform: “All kinds of surprising things can happen there.”
Most people think space is cold, and cooling the data centers would be easy. But Yoon said that’s not the case.
“The way that heat is actually transferred from one thing to another is by bumping into things, usually,” he said. “If I’m standing out in the cold, I feel it being cold because the atmosphere is cold. There’s cold air molecules bumping into my skin all the time and whenever a cold air molecule bumps into my hot skin, it steals a little bit of my heat and carries it away. But if you’re in a vacuum, that doesn’t happen.”
One more thing to keep in mind is the maintenance of the facilities. Things break in data centers on a regular basis. Technology advancements necessitate constant upgrades. On Earth, those tasks are easily performed, but not so much in space.
“If you’re in space, something breaks, it’s actually impossible to go and fix it,” Yoon said. “If you want to go and send human crews to go and actually do repairs, it’s going to be just astronomically more expensive. So from a cost perspective, you kind of lose a lot of efficiency by just being completely unable to do repairs.”
Google explored the extraterrestrial idea recently. The company studied the cost of deploying an 81-satellite system of data centers in low Earth orbit.
“The conclusion that they came up with is maybe if you have everything go your way, sometime around 2035, it might be possible to do this in a way that’s competitive with running a regular data center on Earth today,” Yoon said. “But this has a lot of assumptions built into it, and most importantly, from my perspective, is that it assumes that the cost of electricity on Earth stays the same in the future.”
But companies behind data centers are working on ways to generate their own power, which will have an impact on energy prices a decade from now. So where is all this talk really coming from?
Yoon said he thinks it may have something to do with the growing concerns that AI is an overpriced bubble, putting some strain on Wall Street.
“If you look at the stock market today, it’s been pretty choppy all week, and in particular, for AI companies. It’s been very choppy,” Yoon said. “Companies and investors have huge incentives to keep this excitement up.”
Anything space-related is going to generate excitement and buzz, according to Yoon’s theory.
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