An unusual spacecraft reached orbit in November 2025, one that might herald the dawn of a new era. Called Starcloud-1, it was the size of a small fridge and carried an advanced NVIDIA chip designed to perform complex AI tasks – in space.
Why? Because the startup behind the spacecraft, the US-based Starcloud, thinks that space might be the next great domain for data processing, to the extent that we could one day see giant city-sized structures being assembled in space that will perform a significant chunk of Earth’s processing needs.
“It enables us to access enormous amounts of renewable solar energy and we don’t need to boil off huge amounts of fresh water to keep these data centres cool,” says Philip Johnston, Starcloud’s co-founder and CEO.
“It takes a huge burden off Earth’s resources.”
The rapid advancement of AI, from simple questioning on ChatGPT to complex modelling, has seen the demand for power spike around the globe.
Terrestrial data centres are gobbling up huge swathes of power from grids, with all data centres around the world consuming 415 terawatt hours of power in 2024, or 1.5 per cent of global electricity consumption.
Cooling these centres also requires tremendous amounts of water.
Space offers a potentially ideal location to place data centres, with abundant energy from the Sun and a cold environment – although expelling heat from satellites is still a challenge in the vacuum of space.
The possibility of placing data centres here has garnered significant attention from various organisations, including the European Commission.
The prizes on offer are potentially vast. “The main conclusion is that it’s a promising solution,” says Xavier Roser, a senior executive at space manufacturer Thales Alenia Space in France.
So, what needs to be done, and what is the future of data in space?
Power hungry
Data centres on Earth use tremendous amounts of power. Packed with computers that store and process data, these buildings can consume hundreds of megawatts of power, enough to power tens of thousands of homes.
Meta, the company that owns Facebook, is building a data centre in Louisiana, called Hyperion, that will use five gigawatts of power every day when it’s completed in 2028.
Cooling these computers is also a big challenge, and usually relies on air cooling with fans and chillers, or liquid cooling with water to carry heat away. A single data centre can use millions of litres of water per day.
Building new data centres can also be a slow and taxing process, with hardware quickly becoming outdated, and land needing to be found to house the large numbers of computers and other equipment needed.
“People are starting to realise that data is the most valuable commodity in human history,” says Christopher Stott, CEO of the space data company Lonestar in the US. “It keeps everything going. It’s increasing in value, not losing value.”
Space data centres can offer these same capabilities, from storing data – potentially safe from hackers on the ground – to providing machines to train AI models.
Space data centres could also process some of the vast amounts of data being produced in space, such as climate readings and the images of Earth constantly being captured by satellites in orbit.
“Imaging satellites generate huge amounts of data,” says Ablimit Aili, a researcher specialising in data-centre cooling and thermal management at Zhejiang University in China who published a paper on developing space data centres in October 2025.
He notes that some satellites can generate nearly 50 terabytes of data per day.
If that data could be analysed in orbit – such as AI choosing which images of a wildfire are most useful, for example – that could reduce the amount of data that needs to be sent to Earth, says Aili.
Monolithic satellites
There are several ways to process data in space. One is to launch dedicated data centre satellites equipped with AI chips – like Starcloud-1 – that can perform tasks either for other satellites or for operators on the ground.
Another is to equip satellites with advanced capabilities to process their own data.
“I think the biggest change is going to be satellites being able to do more in orbit than what they can do right now,” says Dr Brian Weeden, director of civil and commercial policy at The Aerospace Corporation in the US.
“It may open up a whole new world of capabilities for how we sense, communicate and do things in space.”
Despite space being very cold, because it’s a vacuum, it’s hard to move heat away from a satellite. The International Space Station (ISS), as well as having very large solar panels, also has huge radiators to take heat away from the station.
Space data centres would need similar capabilities. “We need on one side the infrastructure for large solar panels, and on the other side to have radiators to cool down the system,” says Roser.
To truly move a significant chunk of Earth’s data processing needs to space, large monolithic satellites or constellations of thousands of satellites would be needed.
Starcloud, for example, has spoken of eventually launching an orbital data centre with solar panels measuring a total of 16km2 (6.2 sq miles), a span big enough to dwarf New York’s Central Park.
Such large satellites are “something new that the international community really hasn’t considered,” says Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi School of Law.
Even if such objects were placed far from Earth in high orbits, they could pose a serious collision risk to other satellites that tried to operate in similar locations.
“When you’re talking about things this big, you might get countries objecting,” says Hanlon. “You’re essentially excluding [others] from using that space.”
That said, Hanlon still thinks the concept behind space data centres is sound. “I think we ought to go for it,” she says, to harness “the many amazing resources of space.”
She notes there are “going to be issues and conflicts that arise,” if plans for such large satellites do proceed, however.
No international body exists that would regulate satellites of such a large size, with the licensing of satellites falling to regulators in individual countries, such as the Federal Aviation Administration in the US.
Even then, whether satellites of such size ever come to fruition is unclear. “We have been talking as a community about building large structures for decades,” says Weeden. “Actually doing that has proven very challenging.”
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Mega constellations
In 2023, the European Commission funded a study into the feasibility of space data centres led by Thales Alenia Space, called ASCEND (Advanced Space Cloud for European Net zero emission and Data sovereignty).
Published in June 2024, it found that they were technically feasible, with the only barrier being development timelines.
Not needing water for cooling was seen as a major advantage, as was avoiding land use that could cause heat pollution and environmental damage on Earth.
Roser said that space data centres could take over a decent chunk of Earth’s data processing.
“Targeting 5–15 per cent of the worldwide market would be a good target,” he said, for example, training large AI models and transmitting to the ground via radio and laser.
Smaller ChatGPT requests, which require short latency and communication times, are more likely to remain Earth-based.
An alternative to large, monolithic data centre satellites is launching constellations of thousands of smaller satellites, according to a report by the European Space Policy Institute published in November 2025.
Large constellations of satellites have already been deployed in space for other means, such as SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, which now accounts for more than 9,000 of the 14,000 active satellites and is used to beam high-speed internet to special ground stations on Earth.
Whether we can cope with multiple large constellations in orbit without causing collisions between satellites is unclear, though.
While there has only ever been one collision in space – between a functioning US Iridium satellite and defunct Russian Cosmos satellite in 2009 – experts are increasingly worried there could be more soon.
A recent study suggested Earth’s orbit was becoming so congested that a collision would occur in just three days if all satellites stopped dodging each other, which they currently have to do on a regular basis.
“I’m very sceptical about putting up huge numbers of satellites in mega constellations,” says Sa’id Mosteshar, professor of international space law at the University of London, which future companies might be looking to do with the help of SpaceX’s huge new Starship rocket currently in development.
The number of satellites re-entering from constellations like Starlink has also risen sharply, says Mosteshar, with one or two satellites thought to be re-entering Earth’s atmosphere per day.
The impact on the planet is not yet known.
Some studies suggest that the large amount of metal that’ll burn up in the atmosphere from an ever-increasing number of satellite re-entries could damage the ozone layer.
“Nobody is yet confident that this won’t affect the ozone layer. We just don’t know what that will do environmentally,” says Mosteshar.
Future plans
For the time being, data centre plans are considerably smaller. Starcloud’s first satellite has been running a version of Google’s Gemini AI model in space, and the mission is progressing smoothly so far, says Johnston.
“It’s the first high-powered graphics processing unit in space,” says Johnston. “It’s about 100 times more powerful than [anything] operated in space before.”
Johnston says that as well as running the first version of Gemini, Starcloud-1 has also trained a new AI model in space for the first time. “We trained it on the complete works of Shakespeare,” he says. “So now it’s spouting Shakespeare at us.”
In October 2026, the company is planning to launch its next mission, Starcloud-2, its first fully commercial satellite that customers will be able to pay to use.
The satellite will have “100 times the power generation and 10 times the [computing power] compared to Starcloud-1,” says Johnston, as well as a wingspan of about 30m (100ft) once its solar panels are deployed.
Starcloud isn’t the only company to have launched a data centre into space.
Lonestar has launched two data storage devices to the Moon, one in 2024 and another in 2025, hitching a ride aboard two landers from the US company Intuitive Machines, which both failed to land.
The missions were still considered a success from Lonestar’s perspective, Stott says, with the first transmitting a copy of the US Declaration of Independence and the second mission turning on “immediately after the launch”.
“Sadly, we watched [the lander] fall over, but we did all our testing before we landed.”
Lonestar’s goals are different from Starcloud's. The company is targeting the actual storage of data in space, rather than providing processing power for AI.
According to Stott, the benefit of this is that data can be kept much more securely in space than on Earth, without risk of it being hacked or lost in a natural disaster such as a hurricane.
Initially, Lonestar plans to store data in Earth’s orbit, but might one day consider more remote locations such as the Moon for “some of the real ‘deep-vault’ secure stuff,” says Stott.
Several other companies, including Axiom Space in the US, have also announced plans to launch orbital data centres. How far these will progress, and how effective they’ll be, remains to be seen.
But there might be plenty of opportunities here for companies, or countries, that decide to take the plunge on the technology first.
“Europe [could] have a leading role in these systems,” says Roser. Others might be eager to do the same.
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