Even the Sky May Not Be the Limit for A.I. Data Centers

[John Clark]

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription.

Even the Sky May Not Be the Limit for A.I. Data Centers

Some tech leaders are concerned that the artificial intelligence race will exhaust available land and energy. The solution might lie in orbit.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/technology/space-data-centers-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.BFA.JNGs.VWdnG5_iJuZ_&smid=em-share

[Brent Meeker]

What will these "data centers" do?  I can understand doing LLM training in space, but answering queries in space means transmitting the data up and down which would be a serious bottleneck.

Brent

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[John Clark]

On Thu, Jan 1, 2026 at 4:08 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> What will these "data centers" do?  I can understand doing LLM training in space, but answering queries in space means transmitting the data up and down which would be a serious bottleneck.

 

The amount of signal delay would depend on how high the space based data center orbited, you couldn't put it in low earth orbit but you would not need to put it as high as 36,000 km in geostationary orbit either. A polar orbit of about 8000 km would be ideal, its solar cells would be in constant sunshine and as a bonus it would be above the inner van Allen radiation belt and below the outer van Allen radiation belt.  

And I don't think an additional fraction of a second delay between you asking a question and receiving an answer that is caused by distance would cause much annoyance because I don't think the data center would need to do a lot of up and down communication with Earth to answer most questions, it would already have local access to the data it needed. All the English text in Wikipedia could fit on a compressed file of 24 Gb, and if you include pictures, graphs and videos it would be about 200 terabytes, and just my new iPhone can store 2 terabytes.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

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