Why Orbital Data Centers Are Harder Than Silicon Valley Thinks

“Space computing, the final frontier, has arrived,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declared at the Nvidia GTC conference in March.Indeed, the idea of data centers in orbit has gone from science fiction to a serious spending category. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has acquired xAI (also Musk’s) and is planning a constellation of space-based data centers. Google, not to be outdone, announced Project Suncatcher in partnership with Planet, planning to launch two satellites equipped with Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) AI chips by early 2027. Startup Starcloud has already filed a proposal with the Federal Communications Commission for an 88,000-satellite constellation for orbital data centers. As Starcloud’s filing suggests, these companies are all proposing fleets of satellites numbering in the thousands, each housing a rack or multiple racks of AI-grade GPUs, interconnected with each other through free-space optical links and communicating back to Earth via microwave links, either directly o