They’re a brilliant idea, but a herculean challenge

Data centers are the backbone of our digital infrastructure, supporting everything from social media platforms to online shopping and streaming services. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing and the internet of things, the amount of data generated and processed daily is extremely large, and the demand for data centers is constantly growing.

Data centers, unfortunately, are massively energy hungry—among a host of other environmental drawbacks. One possible solution is to build them in space, and several companies are working on making this a reality. So how would this work, and is it really going to happen?

Worldwide data center demand is expected to rise at around 20% a year over the next few years. In the UK alone, Google, Microsoft and various other US companies are collectively spending £20 billion to ramp up data-center capacity for AI up and down the country.

Yet data centers built for high-performance computing and AI require much more power than a standard facility. This generates a lot more heat, which entails a further substantial increase in power demands for liquid cooling facilities.

According to the International Energy Agency, data centers accounted for about 1% to 1.5% of global energy use in 2023, and this figure is expected to rise significantly in the years ahead. Additionally, cooling systems can exacerbate water shortages in some regions, while the growing e-waste generated from outdated equipment is also a big problem.

To try and address the energy issue, data-center firms have been investing in renewable energy sources like wind, solar and nuclear to reduce their carbon emissions. They’re also using advanced cooling technologies to make their data centers more energy efficient.

Even so, it’s still going to be a major challenge to roll out enough capacity. Data centers require substantial physical space and infrastructure, making expansion both difficult and costly.

A new frontier?

This is why US companies like Lumen Orbit and the EU’s Ascend project are looking to space instead. Data centers beyond Earth’s atmosphere would have access to continuous solar energy and could be naturally cooled by the vacuum of space. Away from terrestrial issues like planning permission, such facilities could be rapidly deployed and expanded as the demand for more data keeps increasing.

It may sound like something from a sci-fi novel, but this concept has been gaining more attention as space technology has advanced and the need for sustainable and scalable data centers has become apparent.

Lumen, which is based in Washington, recently raised US$11 million (£8.9 million) in seed funding that will be used to build a full-scale prototype in 2025. This facility will be geared towards taking huge amounts of raw data from other satellites, then using AI to crunch it down for transmission to Earth, taking up much less bandwidth than would otherwise be required.

Meanwhile, Ascend completed an 18-month study last summer that found that space data centers are economically viable and environmentally feasible, provided the carbon emissions from launchers can be reduced by about tenfold. Backed by French defense giant Thales, it aims to launch a gigawatt of capacity into space over the next 25 years.

As with all too-good-to-be-true ideas, we should certainly be in no doubt about the challenges involved in these kinds of projects. It’s still hugely expensive to launch payloads into orbit, even if companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX have been making significant steps in reducing the cost and increasing the reliability of space launches. This may greatly limit how quickly space data centers could be launched.

There’s also the fact that the latency in communication between Earth and space affects data transmission speeds. Another Musk company, Starlink, has been making inroads into this issue with its burgeoning satellite network, which Musk claims will be as fast as fiber broadband in the years ahead.

Maintaining space data centers poses a major challenge. Space weather, such as solar flares, could disrupt operations, while collisions with debris are a major worry—rather than offsetting the fact that space-based data centers don’t have to fear earthquakes or floods. Advanced shielding could protect against things like radiation and micrometeoroids, but it will probably only do so much—particularly as Earth’s orbit becomes ever more crowded.

To fix damaged facilities, advances in robotics and automation will of course help, but remote maintenance may not be able to address all issues. Sending repair crews remains a very complex and costly affair, and though the falling cost of space launches will again help here, it is still likely to be a huge burden for a few decades to come. In addition, disposing of data center waste takes on a whole new level of complexity off-planet.

So while there is certainly great excitement around this potential answer to our need for ever more data centers, it’s clearly as complex as it is compelling. Hopefully, with serious effort into research and development—as well as global collaboration—this will eventually revolutionize the way we manage and process data. Until then, with apologies, we’ll just have to watch this space.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.