In a way, this entire factor was inevitable. Elon Musk and his coterie have been speaking about AI in house for years — primarily within the context of Iain Banks’ science-fiction collection a couple of far-future universe the place sentient spaceships roam and management the galaxy.
Now Musk sees a possibility to understand a model of this imaginative and prescient. His firm SpaceX has requested regulatory permission to construct solar-powered orbital information facilities, distributed throughout as many as 1,000,000 satellites, that might shift as a lot as 100 GW of compute energy off the planet. He has reportedly urged a few of his AI satellites might be constructed on the moon.
“By far the most cost effective place to place AI might be house in 36 months or much less,” Musk stated final week on a podcast hosted by Stripe co-founder John Collison.
He’s not alone. xAI’s head of compute has reportedly guess his counterpart at Anthropic that 1% of worldwide compute might be in orbit by 2028. Google (which has a big possession stake in SpaceX) has introduced an area AI effort known as Mission Suncatcher, which can launch prototype automobiles in 2027. Starcloud, a startup that has raised $34 million backed by Google and Andreessen Horowitz, filed its personal plans for an 80,000 satellite tv for pc constellation final week. Even Jeff Bezos has stated that is the longer term.
However behind the hype, what’s going to it truly take to get information facilities into house?
In a primary evaluation, at present’s terrestrial information facilities stay cheaper than these in orbit. Andrew McCalip, an area engineer, has constructed a helpful calculator evaluating the 2 fashions. His baseline outcomes present {that a} 1 GW orbital information heart may cost a little $42.4 billion — nearly 3x its ground-bound equal, because of the up-front prices of constructing the satellites and launching them to orbit.
Altering that equation, specialists say, would require expertise improvement throughout a number of fields, large capital expenditure, and a variety of work on the provision chain for space-grade parts. It additionally depends upon prices on the bottom rising as assets and provide chains are strained by rising demand.
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June 23, 2026
Designing and launching the satellites
The important thing driver for any house enterprise mannequin is how a lot it prices to get something up there. Musk’s SpaceX is already pushing down on the price of attending to orbit, however analysts taking a look at what it should take to make orbital information facilities a actuality want even decrease costs to shut their enterprise case. In different phrases, whereas AI information facilities could appear to be a narrative a couple of new enterprise line forward of the SpaceX IPO, the plan depends upon finishing the corporate’s longest-running unfinished challenge — Starship.
Contemplate that the reusable Falcon 9 delivers, at present, a value to orbit of roughly $3,600/kg. Making house information facilities doable, per Mission Suncatcher’s white paper, would require costs nearer to $200/kg, an 18-fold enchancment that it expects to be accessible within the 2030s. At that value, nevertheless, the vitality delivered by a Starlink satellite tv for pc at present could be value aggressive with a terrestrial information heart.
The expectation is that SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket will ship these enhancements — no different car in improvement guarantees equal financial savings. Nonetheless, that car has but to turn out to be operational and even attain orbit; a 3rd iteration of Starship is anticipated to make its maiden launch someday within the months forward.
Even when Starship is totally profitable, nevertheless, assumptions that it’s going to instantly ship decrease costs to prospects could not move the scent take a look at. Economists on the consultancy Rational Futures make a compelling case that, as with the Falcon 9, SpaceX won’t need to cost a lot lower than its greatest competitor — in any other case the corporate is leaving cash on the desk. If Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, for instance, retails at $70 million, SpaceX gained’t tackle Starship missions for exterior prospects at a lot lower than that, which would depart it above the numbers publicly assumed by house information heart builders.
“There aren’t sufficient rockets to launch 1,000,000 satellites but, so we’re fairly removed from that,” Matt Gorman, the CEO of Amazon Net Providers, stated at a current occasion. “If you consider the price of getting a payload in house at present, it’s large. It’s simply not economical.”
Nonetheless, if launch is the bane of all house companies, the second problem is manufacturing value.
“We all the time take without any consideration, at this level, that Starship’s value goes to be a whole bunch of {dollars} per kilo,” McCalip advised TechCrunch. “Individuals are not considering the satellites are nearly $1,000 a kilo proper now.”
Satellite tv for pc manufacturing prices are the biggest chunk of that price ticket, but when high-powered satellites might be made at about half the price of present Starlink satellites, the numbers begin to make sense. SpaceX has made nice advances in satellite tv for pc economics whereas constructing Starlink, its record-setting communications community, and the corporate hopes to realize extra via scale. A part of the reasoning behind 1,000,000 satellites is undoubtedly the associated fee financial savings that come from mass manufacturing.
Nonetheless, the satellites that might be used for these missions should be massive sufficient to fulfill the advanced necessities for working highly effective GPUs, together with massive photo voltaic arrays, thermal administration techniques, and laser-based communications hyperlinks to obtain and ship information.
A 2025 white paper from Mission Suncatcher affords one solution to evaluate terrestrial and house information facilities by the price of energy, the fundamental enter wanted to run chips. On the bottom, information facilities spend roughly $570 to $3,000 for a kW of energy over a yr, relying on native energy prices and the effectivity of their techniques. SpaceX’s Starlink satellites get their energy from on-board photo voltaic panels as a substitute, however the price of buying, launching, and sustaining these spacecraft delivers vitality at $14,700 per kW over a yr. Put merely, satellites and their parts should get quite a bit cheaper earlier than they’re cost-competitive with metered energy.
The house surroundings isn’t playing around
Orbital information heart proponents usually say that thermal administration is “free” in house, however that’s an oversimplification. With out an environment, it’s truly tougher to disperse warmth.
“You’re counting on very massive radiators to only be capable to dissipate that warmth into the blackness of house, and in order that’s a variety of floor space and mass that it’s a must to handle,” stated Mike Safyan, an government at Planet Labs, which is constructing prototype satellites for Google Suncatcher which are anticipated to launch in 2027. “It’s acknowledged as one of many key challenges, particularly long run.”
Apart from the vacuum of house, AI satellites might want to take care of cosmic radiation. Cosmic rays degrade chips over time, and so they may trigger “bit flip” errors that may corrupt information. Chips might be protected with shielding, use rad-hardened parts, or work in collection with redundant error checks, however all these choices contain costly trades for mass. Nonetheless, Google used a particle beam to check the consequences of radiation on its tensor processing models (chips designed explicitly for machine studying functions). SpaceX executives stated on social media that the corporate has acquired a particle accelerator for simply that function.
One other problem comes from the photo voltaic panels themselves. The logic of the challenge is vitality arbitrage: Placing photo voltaic panels in house makes them wherever from 5x to 8x extra environment friendly than on Earth, and in the event that they’re in the suitable orbit, they are often in sight of the solar for 90% of the day or extra, growing their effectivity. Electrical energy is the principle gasoline for chips, so extra vitality equals cheaper information facilities. However even photo voltaic panels are extra difficult in house.
House-rated photo voltaic panels fabricated from uncommon earth parts are hardy, however too costly. Photo voltaic panels made out of silicon are low cost and more and more prevalent in house — Starlink and Amazon Kuiper use them — however they degrade a lot sooner because of house radiation. That may restrict the lifetime of AI satellites to round 5 years, which implies they should generate return on funding sooner.
Nonetheless, some analysts suppose that’s not such a giant deal, based mostly on how rapidly new generations of chips arrive on the scene. “After 5 or 6 years, the {dollars} per kilowatt-hour doesn’t produce a return, and that’s as a result of they’re not cutting-edge,” Philip Johnston, the CEO of Starcloud, advised TechCrunch.
Danny Area, an government at Solestial, a startup constructing space-rated silicon photo voltaic panels, says the business sees orbital information facilities as a key driver of development. He’s talking with a number of corporations about potential information heart tasks, and says “any participant who’s sufficiently big to dream is at the least interested by it.” As a long-time spacecraft design engineer, nevertheless, he doesn’t low cost the challenges in these fashions.
“You possibly can all the time extrapolate physics out to a much bigger dimension,” Area stated. “I’m excited to see how a few of these corporations get to a degree the place the economics make sense and the enterprise case closes.”
How do house information facilities slot in?
One excellent query about these information facilities: What’s going to we do with them? Are they common function, or for inference, or for coaching? Based mostly on current use instances, they will not be totally interchangeable with information facilities on the bottom.
A key problem for coaching new fashions is working hundreds of GPUs collectively en masse. Most mannequin coaching isn’t distributed, however achieved in particular person information facilities. The hyperscalers are working to alter this in an effort to enhance the facility of their fashions, however it nonetheless hasn’t been achieved. Equally, coaching in house would require coherence between GPUs on a number of satellites.
The group at Google’s Mission Suncatcher notes that the corporate’s terrestrial information facilities join their TPU networks with throughput within the a whole bunch of gigabits per second. The quickest off-the-shelf inter-satellite comms hyperlinks at present, which use lasers, can solely stand up to about 100 Gbps.
That led to an intriguing structure for Suncatcher: It entails flying 81 satellites in formation so they’re shut sufficient to make use of the form of transceivers relied on by terrestrial information facilities. That, after all, presents its personal challenges: The autonomy required to make sure every spacecraft stays in its right station, even when maneuvers are required to keep away from orbital particles or one other spacecraft.
Nonetheless, the Google examine affords a caveat: The work of inference can tolerate the orbital radiation surroundings, however extra analysis is required to know the potential affect of bit-flips and different errors on coaching workloads.
Inference duties don’t have the identical want for hundreds of GPUs working in unison. The job might be achieved with dozens of GPUs, maybe on a single satellite tv for pc, an structure that represents a form of minimal viable product and the probably start line for the orbital information heart enterprise.
“Coaching isn’t the perfect factor to do in house,” Johnston stated. “I feel nearly all inference workloads might be achieved in house,” imagining every thing from customer support voice brokers to ChatGPT queries being computed in orbit. He says his firm’s first AI satellite tv for pc is already incomes income performing inference in orbit.
Whereas particulars are scarce even within the firm’s FCC submitting, SpaceX’s orbital information heart constellation appears to anticipate about 100 kW of compute energy per ton, roughly twice the facility of present Starlink satellites. The spacecraft will function in reference to one another and use the Starlink community to share info; the submitting claims that Starlink’s laser hyperlinks can obtain petabit-level throughput.
For SpaceX, the corporate’s current acquisition of xAI (which is constructing its personal terrestrial information facilities) will let the corporate stake out positions in each terrestrial and orbital information facilities, seeing which provide chain adapts sooner.
That’s the good thing about having fungible floating level operations per second — if you may make it work. “A FLOP is a FLOP, it doesn’t matter the place it lives,” McCalip stated. “[SpaceX] can simply scale till [it] hits allowing or capex bottlenecks on the bottom, after which fall again to [their] house deployments.”
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