‘Putting the servers in orbit is a stupid idea’: Could data centers in space help avoid an AI energy crisis? Experts are torn.
Google’s proposal to explore space-based AI infrastructure raises fundamental questions about energy, physics and feasibility – and whether Earth has really run out of options.
By Carly Page
published December 29, 2025
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As artificial intelligence (AI) models keep growing and getting more power-hungry, researchers are starting to ask not whether they can be trained — but where. That’s the context behind Google Research’s recent proposal to explore space-based AI infrastructure, an idea that sits somewhere between serious science and orbital overreach.
The idea, dubbed “Project Suncatcher” and outlined in a study uploaded Nov. 22 to the preprint arXiv database, explores whether future AI workloads could be run on constellations of satellites equipped with specialized accelerators and powered primarily by solar energy.
In certain low Earth or sun-synchronous orbits, the argument goes, solar panels can operate for much of the time, avoiding many of the night-day cycles, atmospheric losses and grid constraints that limit terrestrial data centers. Heat, meanwhile, would be rejected into space via radiative cooling rather than relying on water-intensive cooling systems on Earth.
The push to look beyond Earth for AI infrastructure isn’t coming out of nowhere. Data centers already consume a non-trivial slice of the world’s power supply: recent estimates put global data-center electricity use at roughly 415 terawatt-hours in 2024, or about 1.5% of total global electricity consumption, with projections suggesting this could more than double by 2030 as AI workloads surge.
Utilities in the U.S. are already planning for data centers, driven largely by AI workloads, to account for between 6.7-12% of total electricity demand in some regions by 2028, prompting some executives to warn that there simply “isn’t enough energy on the grid” to support unchecked AI growth without significant new generation capacity.
In that context, proposals like space-based data centers start to read less like sci-fi indulgence and more like a symptom of an industry confronting the physical limits of Earth-bound energy and cooling. On paper, space-based data centers sound like an elegant solution. In practice, some experts are unconvinced.
Reaching for the stars
Joe Morgan, COO of data center infrastructure firm Patmos, is blunt about the near-term prospects. “What won’t happen in 2026 is the whole ‘data centers in space’ thing,” he told Live Science. “One of the tech billionaires might actually get close to doing it, but aside from bragging rights, why?”
Morgan points out that the industry has repeatedly flirted with extreme cooling concepts, from mineral-oil immersion to subsea facilities, only to abandon them once operational realities bite. “There is still hype about building data centers under the ocean, but any thermal benefits are far outweighed by the problem of replacing components,” he said, noting that hardware churn is fundamental to modern computing.
That churn is central to the skepticism around orbital AI. GPUs and specialized accelerators depreciate quickly as new architectures deliver step-change improvements every few years. On Earth, racks can be swapped, boards replaced and systems upgraded continuously. In orbit, every repair requires launches, docking or robotic servicing — none of which scale easily or cheaply.
“Who wants to take a spaceship to update the orbital infrastructure every year or two?” Morgan asks. “What if a vital component breaks? Actually, forget that, what about the latency?”
