Space Solar Race Heats Up, Now With Flying Data Centers

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Sure, why not shoot data centers up into space? They are already sucking up way too much energy here on Earth, a staggering amount of sucking that is going to suck even more alongside the skyrocketing demands of AI training. The devil is in the details but the allure of ultra-cheap 24/7 solar power in space beckons. So does the Wild West-ish environment, with plenty of opportunities for expansion and no pesky neighbors to raise objections.

AI And Space Solar

Space-to-space solar technology has decades of proven use behind it, including a growing number of satellites and the International Space Station, among other objects. NASA is depending on significant new developments in the space-to-space area to fuel a fresh wave of activity on the Moon and elsewhere, too.

NASA is not quite as enthusiastic about a newly emerging area of space solar innovation, which involves collecting solar energy out in space and beaming it down to receivers on Earth. Though NASA recently affirmed that its primary interest is in space-to-space solar, stakeholders in the space-to-Earth field have been attracting investor attention. They are edging close to the demonstration phase, the pitch being that we here on Earth can get all the solar power we need without having to use up land for ground-mounted solar arrays (see more space-to-Earth background here).

The US startup Lumen Orbit appears to agree with NASA. They are not waiting around for space-to-Earth solar to happen. With a business model focusing on the energy demands of AI training, Lumen Orbit notes that the next generation of data centers on Earth will face a long series of delays, regardless of where they get their power. Those obstacles are all but absent in the space-to-space solar field.

“In Western countries, new large-scale energy and infrastructure projects often take a decade or more to complete due to myriad permitting requirements, rights of way and utility/transmission line restrictions, and environmental reviews,” Lumen explains.

The pace of the energy transition is also a matter of concern. Here in the US, for example, data center stakeholders are already putting the squeeze on local and regional power generation resources, with some falling back on coal and natural gas power plants instead of seeking out renewables.

Space Solar: How It Works

Lumen has posted a white paper detailing the business case for the space solar – data center mashup. All the details are available online under the title, “Why we should train AI in space.” The gist of it involves the low cost of launching a rocket nowadays, the availability of low-cost solar energy in space, and a modular, containerized design that can be expanded into multiple gigawatts without any pressure on terrestrial power systems.

“Instead of paying $140 million for electricity, you can pay $10 million for a launch and solar,” Johnston told TechCrunch earlier this month, with $140 million being the estimated cost of electricity to run a comparable data center on Earth. The savings comes both from low-cost space solar arrays and from the chilly atmosphere up in space, which offsets the energy needs of cooling systems.

Permitting and reporting requirements for the orbiting data centers would be minimal, except for issues involving space debris and decommissioning as noted by Lumen in its white paper. Lumen expects to mitigate the debris issue by deploying its flying data centers in underutilized low Earth orbits.

Another issue involves the loss of visibility at night for astronomical observation due to the increasing number of things flying around the Earth. Lumen intends to skirt that problem with a fixed orbit designed to take optimal advantage of space solar energy. As a result, its data centers will be visible only at dawn and dusk, when natural light is already present.

If you’re wondering what Lumen will do with all the data up there, that’s a good question. Data would be relayed to Earth via optical laser. Lumen is also considering a shuttle-style system, described as “small docking modules launched from the ground that can be used to easily transport petabytes or even exabytes of data in a single trip.”

The Space Solar Advantage

All of this sounds very futuristic compared to the here-and-now availability of land and energy to build and operate new data centers. Nevertheless, the land-energy nexus already shows signs of strain. The software firm Paces, for example, has been tracking a rapid decrease in the amount of suitable land for solar development. The report only covered New York and Illinois, but it raised alarm bells. In addition, county governments have been raising more obstacles against new wind and solar farms, and the nation’s newly hatched offshore wind industry faces an uncertain future under the incoming Trump administration.

Against this backdrop, Lumen’s space solar solution offers a seemingly do-able alternative. That remains to be seen, but TechCrunch reports that Lumen plans to launch multiple gigawatts’ worth of its data centers by 2030, beginning with a demonstrator this spring before moving on to a scaled up test in 2026.

Lumen also draws attention to the multinational ASCEND consortium in the EU, which recently released a space solar study spearheaded by the joint venture Thales Alenia Space.

“Space environment is offering high solar illumination position and cold space view, that would benefits to data centres application. Space Data centres are foreseen as a promising alternative to reduce environmental footprint and energy consumption of digital application on earth,” the ASCEND website reads.