Tech billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are extending their long-running space rivalry into a new arena: putting AI data centers in orbit as demand for computing capacity surges.
Blue Origin has had a team working for more than a year on technology needed for orbital AI data centers, a person familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal. SpaceX is planning to use an upgraded version of its Starlink satellites to host AI computing payloads and has pitched the concept as part of a share sale that could value the company at $800 billion, unnamed sources said.
Backers say space-based computing could sidestep terrestrial constraints such as the huge power demands of training and running AI systems, by tapping solar energy in orbit and beaming data back to Earth. Skeptics counter that the engineering risks and costs are being underestimated, and that orbiting data centers may struggle to compete with ground-based facilities.
Google and Planet Labs plan to launch two test satellites in early 2027 carrying Google’s tensor processing units. A Google executive said it could take 10,000 satellites, assuming 100-kilowatt satellites, to match a gigawatt data center’s compute capacity.
A growing roster of companies is exploring orbital data centers, including IBM’s Red Hat and Axiom Space, along with venture-backed startups. Key hurdles include cooling chips in orbit, radiation protection and fast, reliable data links.