- America. Much harder since the elections. Not appealing.
- Europe. Doesn't have enough electricity with anti-AI, anti-big tech and high tax governments. Not appealing.
- Latin America. Expensive, likely to have your assets appropriated by socialists. Not appealing.
- Africa. No.
- Middle East. Your GPU cluster might get blown up. No.
- China. To some extent yes. Plenty of power and space, pro-AI government, but many companies don't want to send their IP to a country famous for copying it and they're still under GPU sanctions.
- Japan, Korea, etc. Maybe. They're not really famous for big datacenters though.
- Australia, Canada. Possible, but you're exposed to Europe-style political risks.
There just aren't many places on Earth where it's realistic to build and operate AI datacenters once political issues and grid constraints are taken into account.
Did they though? From what I’ve read the places where they build get lots of money and infrastructure (not only DC-related) from them.
https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-says-it-is-going-to-stop-...
https://www.wpr.org/news/microsoft-to-stop-using-ndas-with-l...
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/27/nx-s1-5879528/data-center-nda...
I mostly agree with you, and obviously there is a lot of intelligence in the valley, but there doesn't seem to be much wisdom.
https://www.govtech.com/question-of-the-day/how-many-anti-da...
Whether it’s A16Z tweeting about how the value of all white collar wages is their market or Anthropic basically saying entry level jobs are done.
In seriousness this is an example of the previous point. Rather than engaging with the issue the tech/DC industry seems to think they can wordplay their way out of it by quibbling about irrelevant technical details and people are primed to get extremely angry at grinfucking type behaviour nowadays.
If you have the technical chops to set up a data center in space — with no connections to the electrical grid or municipal water, you can use your technology to build your data center with the same specs right here on earth in 90% of places that you think are issuing "bans". You'll also get much better cooling for free via convection.
A remote town with a population of 43 will be happy for a data center to employ 2 locals, but data center operators aren't doing that today because they want tax breaks tiny towns can't give, infrastructure tiny towns don't have, nevermind a well-armed police force to deter would-be GPU thieves. Space is a red herring.
Remote towns with populations of 43 are exactly the sorts of places that are pushing back on having datacenters in their areas.
And space is the ultimate physical protection. In reality a bigger issue than GPU thefts are protests or leftist groups trying to firebomb you. See the problems the Tesla factory in Germany has had with leftist violence, like setting its electricity pylons on fire (because electric cars "consume natural resources and are not sustainable", lol). The left has become very anti-AI and so the risk of attacks on facilities, especially if built outside the USA, is quite high which in turn means you have to overbuild physical security like high fences.
Whether they can be worth the money it cost to put them in orbit is another story.
Apples to oranges, long-lived satellites have modest power needs. Doing a back-of-the napkin math on required size of solar array and radiative elements for a single-rack's worth of energy is a sobering exercise for those who are a overly exuberant on the topic. The all-in power estimate for a single GB300 chip is 2.1kW
Edit: ISS is about 90KW steady state, and the collector to radiator area ratio is about 5:1. Dunno about the mass ratio.
My point is not that space data centers are viable or sensible. Only that the need for cooling is limited. If a terrestrial datacenter was powered only by its rooftop solar panels, cooling it would be trivial. Space is harder, but there just isn’t that much heat to dump.
A simple rock in orbit radiates exactly as much heat as hits it from the sun, on average.
You are correct that the first law of thermodynamics dictates the energy, but anyone who has parked a car in the sun will tell you, the temperature where the absorption/dissipation equilibrium is achieved is often incompatible with the survival of the cargo.
edit to your edit:
> Edit: ISS is about 90KW steady state, and the collector to radiator area ratio is about 5:1. Dunno about the mass ratio.
Cool; that's about half the wattage of one modern full-height Nvidia AI rack (172kW) - you need two ISSes to service just 1 rack; extrapolate that to a data center's worth of racks and see if the math is mathing. The ISS is about the size of a(n American) football field.
Space datacenters are just SDI2, a convenient bullshit to be able to funnel more money to campaign donors.
As long as there’s space on earth, Space Datacenters can never be economical. It’s rally that simple.
We’re not talking about launching little satellites here, we’re talking about replacing giant buildings.
The radiators are not a big deal. The solar panels required are much bigger. You can just run the electronics really hot to improve the efficiency of the radiation. Nobody is going to get close to those chips so the usual safety requirements don't apply.
You don't service it. Over time the chips degrade and become less useful. Eventually you deorbit it and it burns up. It's a sealed unit, not meant to be replaced.
Data centers in brownfields and urban environments see near-zero resistance. There are data centers in skyscrapers in the center of most major U.S. cities, and nobody cares.
Stop plowing down the forests, slurping up the aquifers, and digging up the prairies, and people will stop complaining.
Put a data center next to BoAT, and nobody cares.
A recent law also gave data centers the last priority for grid access. The idea was to prioritize productive industry over less productive uses of electricity. Even something with as little added value as steel production tends to employ ~10 people (directly or as subcontractors) and produce ~€10 million/year of exports for every MW of average power consumption.
a. put them a few miles outside urban centers
b. put them in space
Which is a cheaper, better option?
Also pretty sure there will always be empty land somewhere on earth where no one cares. It will always be easier to build and maintain even in a desert than in space.
1. Everything rusts.
2. There is no permanent power source, unlike in sun synchronous orbit where you have 24/7 daylight.
3. The US has no ship building industry of any size.
4. Storms can destroy things.
There is no empty space on Earth unclaimed by governments. Given the results of the American midterms essentially all land is currently controlled by left wing governments, and the left is very anti-AI. Only China really wants to build AI at scale but they don't have enough chips yet. That might change, but even then not many companies want to upload all their IP to China.
So you can forget building more or less any large industrial projects on Earth for the foreseeable future. It may not matter. There appears to be a GPU glut starting anyway, so who knows if anyone will even need new datacenters for a while?