As the relentless, energy hungry demands of artificial intelligence and cloud computing push terrestrial infrastructure to its breaking point, tech giants and space startups are racing toward the ultimate frontier-orbit.

Amid land scarcity and strained power grids, a race is underway to build data centres in space, turning to the constant power of the sun and the natural vaccum cooling of space to sustainably power the next generation of computing.

A Hyderabad-based Space startup, Skyroot Aerospace which is eyeing to become India’s first privately developed orbital launch vehicle, has set its sights on setting up data centres in space. According to Pawan Kumar Chandana, Co-Founder & CEO, Skyroot, is aiming to start technology demonstrations of orbital data centres, beginning with proof-of-concept missions and demonstrations over the coming years. Speaking to FE, he said that though commercial deployment of data centres in space is years away, space-based infrastructure could emerge as a new segment for launch providers as AI workloads grow globally. 

Skyroot figures among the companies across the world which are assessing the feasibility of processing and storing data in orbit, in turn potentially reducing energy and cooling constraints faced by data centres on earth.

The GPU-capable data centres in space have the advantage of zero-gravity cooling, near-infinite solar energy and the ability to place compute above geopolitical bottlenecks. Elon Musk recently announced that SpaceX will be sending data centres into spaceIt would require simple scaling up of Starlink V3 satellites which have high speed laser links.The US Startup Starcloud is also on a mission to send data centres into space.