New: Firm Claims They Can Build Data Centers in Space

A big part of what is driving electrical generation capacity right now, not only here in the United States but everywhere, is the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and the huge, energy-hungry data centers that are required for AI to work. Some tech companies are making deals with nuclear fission plants, and some are betting on a practical fusion reactor. But now one company, claiming to be an "in space construction firm," is talking up the prospects of building truly massive solar power grids and possibly data centers... (Cue dramatic voice) in spaaaaace. (Cut dramatic voice.)

And, as you may suspect, I have some questions about this idea.

Nvidia recently made headlines by announcing that one of the companies it is partnering with, Starcloud, plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with “super-large solar and cooling panels approximately 4 kilometers in width and length.”
To put that into perspective, the eight main solar arrays on the International Space Station—the largest ever assembled in space, requiring many space shuttle launches and spacewalks—span about 100 meters and produce a maximum of about 240 kW. That’s about 0.005 percent of the power Starcloud intends to generate.

So, who's going to build this thing?

“Our mission is to build things that are going to be useful in space,” Phil Frank, chief executive of Rendezvous Robotics, told Ars. “It could be large, flat surfaces like a Solar array. Ostensibly, the size is not the limit anymore, because we can additively assemble things and then reconfigure them in orbit. And that’s the core thesis of our company that led to us talking to the Starcloud team.”
Rendezvous Robotics was founded last year by Frank, veteran space executive Joe Landon, and an inventor named Ariel Ekblaw.
The company’s technology is based on research by Ekblaw, who founded the Space Exploration Initiative at MIT Media Lab in 2016, and led development of a self-assembling tile technology called Project TESSERAE. She has already completed a couple of tests with NASA in space, and another larger demonstration with 32 dinner plate-sized tiles is planned for next year on board the International Space Station. The new company seeks to commercialize Ekblaw’s work.

Here's the thing: Solar power on Earth may only be good in niche applications, but in space, where the room to build is pretty much unlimited and one can use the full force of the sun's light, unaffected by atmosphere, cloud cover, and so on, it's not only more effective, but it's pretty much the only game in town.

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But this statement by Starcloud's CEO, well, I think it raises more questions than it answers.

“Starcloud’s mission is to move cloud computing closer to where data is generated,” Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston said in a statement. “Partnering with Rendezvous gives us the ability to scale our orbital power and cooling systems to meet the growing demand for space-based datacenters and AI workloads. Together, we’re laying the groundwork for a new class of orbital infrastructure.”

Now, as far as I'm aware, data - new data - is generated by people. There aren't very many people in orbit at the moment. So I'm not sure what that means. As for those questions I mentioned:

What, precisely, will these orbital installations do?

Will the data centers themselves be in space? If so, how will the data - petabytes, maybe exabytes - of data be moved back and forth from these orbital data centers to the people on Earth that wish to make use of the data?

Will the orbital installations only include the solar power generation panels? If so, how will the energy be moved back and forth from orbit to the planet's surface?

I think this is an idea that still has an awful lot of bugs to work out.

Space Ghost did not reply to a request for comments.

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