Data centers in orbit? Elon Musk’s proposal regarding the demand for energy for AI

Elon Musk’s decision to merge his aerospace company SpaceX with his artificial intelligence company xAI fueled the debate: is putting data centers in orbit feasible or is it a nonsensical idea?

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Musk raised the possibility of installing data centers in space, at a time when SpaceX leads the space rocket market.

Electric car maker Tesla, also owned by Musk, is working on developing humanoid robots, with the potential to create space maintenance crews.

In late 2025, US startup Starcloud launched a refrigerator-sized satellite containing an Nvidia graphics processing unit into orbit, which the AI ​​chip maker called a “cosmic debut” for the mini data center.

Tech giant Google, for its part, presented plans to launch test satellites in early 2027 as part of its Suncatcher project, aimed at building solar-powered data centers.

Blue Origin, the rocket and satellite company founded by Amazon creator Jeff Bezos, is heavily promoting TeraWave, a high-speed space network that can be used by data centers to move information anywhere on the planet.

More than a dozen startups, aerospace leaders, and big tech companies are involved in developing, testing, or planning space data centers.

The great attraction of space is the energy supply, with the possibility of synchronizing the satellites with the sun’s orbit so that the light constantly falls on the solar panels.

In space, there is no need to buy land or comply with local regulations or face community resistance to projects.

Others claim that data centers in space would generally be less harmful to the environment, aside from the pollution generated by rocket launches.

“The idea is that it will soon make much more sense to build data centers in space than to build them on Earth,” Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston said at a technology conference last year.

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Current projects include clustering satellites in low Earth orbit, placed close enough to each other to ensure reliable wireless connectivity.

And lasers that connect space computers with terrestrial systems.

One obstacle to deploying servers in space is the cost of putting them into orbit.

SpaceX’s reusable mega-rocket, called Starship, has enormous payload potential, promising to dramatically reduce launch costs.

However, there are critical technical issues to resolve, such as the damage that data centers could suffer from high levels of radiation and extreme temperatures, or the danger of them being hit by space debris.

Another question is how they would be repaired economically.

Phillip Metzger, a professor in the physics department at the University of Florida and a former NASA scientist, indicated in a recent publication that these servers could be maintained with robots and small, easily replaceable modular parts.