Before the AI race went into overdrive, the war for industrial-level data storage solutions was inevitable. It’s not a secret that data holds immense importance in the current age. Many people have already addressed data as the new oil. In truth though, it’s perhaps even more precious.
Every global tech giant has multiple data centres built already to store the data it collects on you. They’ve invested hundreds of billions of dollars to build the infrastructure, and spend something similar for their maintenance.
But, Starcloud, in collaboration with NVIDIA, has recently changed the address of such data centres. They are planning to move the ecosystem into space, and if they have their way, in the coming future, the Earth will no longer be home to any data centres.
The prototype Starcloud-1; a 5GW data centre made using NVIDIA’s H-100 GPUs, was launched on November 2, 2025, which took the AI race to a completely different dimension.
Many of us might not be aware of what goes on behind the curtains at a data centre. These data centres are collecting massive amounts of data, but the rapid, exponential growth of AI’s compute power, particularly in training large language models (LLM) and for inferencing, has created an unprecedented environmental and infrastructural crisis on Earth, which is a damn serious matter.
Major tech giants, including Google, Meta, and OpenAI, are aggressively expanding their data centres, leading to unsustainable pressure on finite natural resources, most notably, land, water, and energy.
Data centres are some of the biggest consumers of electricity and water. A single data centre can go through millions of gallons of water in a day to cool its GPU load.
According to a report by PewResearch, data centres in the US consumed around 17 billion gallons of water in 2023. That number is projected to reach 33 billion by 2028.
Outer space offers a solution to the energy and cooling crises facing data centres here on earth, and may make Earth-based computing obsolete. This advantage is dual-pronged: a near-constant presence of solar energy and highly efficient natural cooling.
In space, solar power is very easy to generate, as compared to the Earth. Satellites in space can use advanced solar panels that are up to eight times more efficient than what we normally use on the Earth.
The decisive advantage, however, is the reliability and constant availability of the sun. When in orbit, satellites can continuously track the sun to maximise light absorption. Most critically, placing data centres in orbit eliminates the terrestrial day/night cycle, providing 24/7 continuous solar energy. This access to "unlimited, low-cost renewable energy" is why industry leaders believe we should be making the move.
The primary engineering headache on Earth is dealing with the intense heat that is generated by GPUs, gets solved naturally in space.
The vacuum of space provides a great passive cooling environment, which means they don’t need massive cooling systems that consume a lot of water. This fundamental advantage should allow spaced-based data centres to entirely bypass the water consumption crisis on Earth..
The move toward space-based data centres is not a futuristic novelty but a direct, strategic necessity driven by the Earth’s limited resources and the ever growing demands of AI. Undoubtedly, there will be dozens of hurdles that such a plan will have to go through before it is successful
Consider this: even Google has responded to this development and has announced Project SunCatcher, in which they aim to AI data centers in space by 2027.
