The debate about the advisability of building giant data centers in orbit has raged for months. This is Silicon Valley’s new big idea to solve the insatiable energy appetite of artificial intelligence. Until, as usual, Elon Musk entered the conversation with the finesse of a hammer.
Elon Musk has joined the chat. After weeks of debate over the possibility of building servers in space, Eric Berger, editor of Ars Technica, argued that this would become a more likely option when the technology to autonomously assemble satellites in orbit becomes available. This was the moment Elon Musk chose to enter the conversation.
ELON MUSK VS JEFF BEZOS: STAR WARS
“This will be sufficient to scale the Starlink V3 satellites, which have high-speed laser communications,” the SpaceX CEO wrote. “SpaceX is going to do it,” he said. A phrase that must have struck a chord with startups using the momentum of AI to seek funding.
Why do we need servers in space? The idea of moving computing into Earth orbit responds to a very real crisis: AI is an energy monster, and the demand for data centers continues to grow. Given this panorama, space offers two advantages not possible on Earth:
- Almost Unlimited Energy: In a sun-synchronous orbit, the solar panels receive sunlight almost continuously (more than 95% of the time).
- Free cooling: Terrestrial data centers consume millions of liters of fresh water for cooling. With a large enough heatsink, the gap can be an “infinite heatsink at -270°C”. The heat will radiate into the vacuum without wasting a single drop of water.
New titans of space II. Musk is not the first to see this business. In fact, he arrives at a party where the first contracts are already being handed out. During Italian Tech Week, Jeff Bezos predicted that in the next 10 to 20 years we will see “giant learning clusters” of artificial intelligence in orbit.
Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, bought the rocket company Relativity Space to do just that. And Nvidia, the undisputed king of AI hardware, is actively backing startup Starcloud, which plans to launch the first NVIDIA H100 GPU into space this November with the goal of eventually building a massive 5 gigabyte orbiting data center.
Why Musk won. Bezos, Schmidt and Starcloud’s vision faces two colossal hurdles: startup costs and building the servers themselves. Calculations for a 1 GW data center would require more than 150 launches with current technology. And Starcloud’s plan for a 4 kilometer wide array is a logistical nightmare.
Elon Musk has the Starship, the giant rocket that all of his competitors’ business models depend on to be profitable. And you don’t need to to build new orbital data center. Just adapt and scale the one you already have.
10,000 satellites and growing. SpaceX’s Starlink constellation is no longer competing with satellite Internet, it’s going for terrestrial fiber. Musk’s company has already launched 10,000 satellites and is preparing for deployment the new V3 satellites designed for Starship with high-speed laser lines.
According to SpaceX itself, each Starship launch will add 60 terabits per second of capacity to the network, which in practice is already a global computing and data network. While Starcloud needs to hire a rocket and assemble 4km wide solar and cooling panels, Musk simply requires Starship to complete development in order to continue launching satellites.
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