AI Datacenters can take up valuable real estate, guzzle vast amounts of electricity, and require constant cooling, but a startup has an interesting idea to solve these problems — move these datacenters into space.
Starcloud, an NVIDIA-backed startup, plans to build AI datacenters in outer space. And this isn’t a far off vision — it’s looking to send its first satellite with a GPU into space later this month. This will be the first time a data-center class GPU will be operational from outer space.
“In space, you get almost unlimited, low-cost renewable energy,” said Starcloud co-founder and CEO Philip Johnston. “The only cost on the environment will be on the launch, then there will be 10x carbon-dioxide savings over the life of the data center compared with powering the data center terrestrially on Earth,” he added.
There could be potential benefits to having datacenters in space. The biggest input to datacenters is electricity to power GPUs, and satellites in a sun-synchronous orbit have access to constant, uninterrupted solar power, which Starcloud plans to harness with large deployable solar arrays. In addition, space offers low-cost cooling, as the vacuum of space acts as a natural “infinite heat sink,” allowing for passive radiative cooling without the need for water or energy-intensive chilling systems. Space-based datacenters could also get around pesky real estate issues — tech companies often face opposition from local governments over setting up datacenters in their cities and towns, and by avoiding physical infrastructure and land-use limitations on earth, Starcloud can scale its orbital data centers almost indefinitely. The company projects a significant reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions over the lifetime of its data centers compared to Earth-based facilities that rely on non-renewable energy.
Starcloud projects the energy costs in space to be 10x cheaper than land-based options, even including launch expenses. “In 10 years, nearly all new data centers will be being built in outer space,” Johnston says. In the long run, Starcloud envisions deploying gigawatt-scale orbital data centers by the early 2030s, using solar arrays several kilometers wide.
Starcloud isn’t the only company that’s predicting datacenters in space. Just last week, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had said that he’d bet that there would be datacenters running in space in less than 20 years. And with the first GPUs slated to go into space later this month, this vision could become a reality long before most people expect.