But not everyone is that optimistic. According to Gartner, space-based data centers won’t be useful for decades, so companies should focus on expanding capacity down here on Earth.
“I honestly think the idea with the current landscape of putting data centers in space is ridiculous,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told The Indian Express in February.
Current satellite computing can’t easily scale to data centers, agrees Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research. “Weight is still the restriction,” he says. “It’s the equivalent of you buying a tablet or small laptop to travel across Latin America versus putting in a data center in the Amazon. Different power requirements, investment, totally different setup.”
Then there are issues like damaged solar panels from meteorite storms and satellite debris, he adds. “You would have to pay for operational redundancy, which is further investment.”
“Data centers will be built where they are affordable,” he says. “I don’t see space happening soon. Remember the Microsoft submerged one? Crickets…”
But he agrees that solar power is nice, though the sun is only visible from one side of the planet at any given time. And space is cold, he says.
Cooling down in outer space
In fact, space is very cold. Close to absolute zero cold. But vacuum is also a great insulator, and there’s no air to move the heat around.
“You can’t convect heat away,” says Richard Bonner, CTO at Accelsius, a liquid cooling company. Bonner has worked on NASA research projects about the challenge of cooling in space and is very familiar with the problem.
A small proportion of the heat might be turned back into useful electricity, but that’s not really a solution, he says, because computer chips don’t get quite that hot.
Instead, heat is radiated. When an object warms up, it generates electromagnetic radiation. This is how we’re able to see warm bodies at night with infrared glasses.
“So, the only way to let that heat go is by radiation,” Bonnor says. “And it requires surface area, so you need these big panels to radiate the heat.” For data centers, these could be football-field-sized panels, he says.
It might seem that the backs of the solar panels would be a good place to radiate excess heat, but solar panels generate their own heat that needs to be radiated away.
The technology is there, Bonner says, and is already in use, though on a much smaller scale than what a full-sized data center would need. “Solar panels, radiator panels—not only do they exist, but they’ve existed for many, many decades,” he says.
Another kind of computing that benefits greatly from being surrounded by the coldness of space is quantum computing. Space could be uniquely beneficial here, Bonner says. “Quantum computers don’t have to dissipate a lot of heat, but they do require very, very cold temperatures. The other nice thing about space is that there’s no vibration.”
But that doesn’t mean that quantum computers are going to be launched into space tomorrow. “Given how sensitive these instruments are, there’s a lot that has to happen to allow them to survive launch,” he says.
Unless they’re built up in space to start with. But that’s a subject for a different article, maybe a decade from now.
