The future of data centers is above the clouds

Shoot for the moon and if you miss, you will still be among the stars…and soon, possibly some data centers.

According to a recent white paper from Lumen Orbit, a startup with the goal of creating data centers in space, the future of AI development will depend largely on our ability to execute new data centers that require “many” gigawatts of new energy projects to power them, a task that might be challenging on Earth, but easier in orbit. Besides, in space, nobody can hear data centers scream.

Researchers of the white paper claim that data centers in space, dubbed orbital data centers, offer several advantages compared to their terrestrial counterparts, including:

• Reduced operating expenses from relying on 24/7 solar power that is unhampered by factors such as day/night cycles and weather.
• The ability to be linearly scaled almost “indefinitely,” allowing for power generation in the gigawatt range. (For perspective, Oracle chairman and CTO Lawrence Ellison told investors on the company’s latest quarterly earnings call that its largest data center has a capacity of 800 megawatts.)
• A faster speed of deployment due to a lack of permitting constraints.

The white paper was co-authored by Ezra Feilden, Adi Oltean, and Philip Johnston, co-founders of Lumen Orbit, the Redmond, Washington-based startup that believes data centers in space can be “cost competitive, sustainable, and rapidly scalable.” Johnston told IT Brew that the argument for orbital data centers goes beyond it just being a “cool” idea.

“You don’t want to have all this heavy polluting industry down on Earth. It consumes an enormous amount of freshwater [and it] consumes an enormous amount of land,” Johnston said. “It’s much better to put things like that in space and keep Earth for earthlings and its inhabitants.”

Fact or fiction? Johnston and his team estimate that it would cost $167 million to operate a 40 megawatt terrestrial data center for ten years, versus $8.2 million to operate an orbital data center of the same size for that length of time.

IT Brew spoke with Mark Fernandez, principal investigator on the Spaceborne Computer-2, a supercomputer that was launched into space by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and NASA, and Ben Bennett, director of HPC and AI strategic marketing at HPE, to scope out the reality of executing orbital data centers. Fernandez said that these data centers can avoid environmental and scaling concerns that hinder data centers on Earth.

“[I]n space, if you take a bold, forward-looking approach of having interconnectable modules, then you have no restraints for the physical space. No pun intended,” Fernandez said, adding that space can offer “free power” and free cooling.

However, while the benefits of orbital data centers are “theoretically” good, there are a number of practical hurdles that stand in the way during execution, Bennett told IT Brew.

“The engineering aspects of deployment are quite…challenging,” Bennett said, adding that you can’t just use a registered jack-45, a connector used for network cabling, in space.

Bennett—who has led HPE’s work on the European ASCEND study, which examines the environmental benefits of data centers in space—added that CO2 emissions from rocket launches are the “hidden cost” that is often forgotten when discussing orbital data centers. The white paper conceives that “five gigawatts of compute could be deployed with fewer than 100 launches.”

“You wouldn’t want to stand underneath the rocket going off, even if it wasn’t hot,” said Bennett. “The filth and the fumes that come out are not pleasant.”

Johnston told IT Brew that Lumen Orbit anticipates there will be “much less” emissions from launching an orbital data center than running it terrestrially for five years.

Race to space. Johnston told IT Brew that Lumen Orbit plans to send a 40 megawatt data center into orbit by 2029. But Lumen is not the only company looking to achieve what feels like the impossible. Venture-capital-backed startup Lonestar Data Holdings in April announced that it plans on making its second flight to the moon later this year for its Freedom Payload mission, which it says will be the first time a physical data center is flown off-planet.

Orbital data centers have a long way to go before becoming mainstream. Fernandez told IT Brew that he doesn’t expect to see orbital data centers at a large scale within the next decade.

But who knows? Maybe the sky isn’t the limit, after all.