Orbital data centers could be the next frontier in the AI race for massive infrastructure buildouts, but experts are divided on the timeline, with one saying it is a “next-decade event," even as Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) CEO Elon Musk is eyeing a launch in late 2027.
"This is an early 2030s, next-decade event," said Evelyn Chow, portfolio manager at Neuberger, in an interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box Asia on Wednesday. "We’ll need to see significant satellite launches over the next four to five years, and a concomitant buildout of connectivity, before we can start to contemplate true scale in orbital data centers.”
Elon Musk Vision for Space Data Centers
SpaceX is pitching investors on a trillion-dollar vision of millions of solar-powered satellites equipped with AI chips, aimed at creating a new orbital data center market.
Last month, Musk noted that SpaceX’s AI unit SpaceXAI would use Nvidia Corp.‘s (NASDAQ:NVDA) Vera CPUs for a more cost-effective, space-optimized Vera Rubin system for orbital AI. In addition, Musk said that SpaceX had designed a space-optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 system for launch to orbit in the fourth quarter of next year, with significant scale in 2028.
Challenges of Putting Data Centers in Space
However, experts point to several challenges to this infrastructure buildout in space.
"Cooling is a huge issue," said Chow. Terrestrial data centers can depend on liquid cooling to manage heat, but cooling works differently in the vacuum of space. “It also needs to be tolerant to radiation,” she added.
Meanwhile, Blaine Curcio, the founder of Orbital Gateway Consulting, told CNBC that the 2030s timeline is a "fair assessment," but cautioned that SpaceX has proven investors wrong before. “Had you asked any satellite industry expert in the late 2010s whether SpaceX could launch 10,000 satellites by 2025, every single one of them, myself included, would have said, ‘no chance,” said Curcio.
However, Curcio sees obstacles related to the rate of technological advancement. "GPUs are evolving so quickly that if you launch a state-of-the-art data center into space, at an enormous cost, it might be obsolete in a couple of years," he added.
Last month, Christopher Smith, a senior aerospace engineer at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, had highlighted the "tremendous" logistical challenges of maintaining a constellation of 1 million satellites called Starmind by SpaceX. Smith’s calculations suggest that SpaceX would need to launch more than nine Starship rockets daily based on the assumption that the company would replace the data center chips every five years, with each rocket carrying about 60 satellites.
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