As global demand for computing continues to blow up, the carbon footprint of knowledge centers is a growing concern. A brand new study outlines how hosting these facilities in space could help slash the sector’s emissions.
Data centers require enormous amounts of power and water to operate and funky the thousands and thousands of chips housed inside them. Current estimates from the International Energy Agency peg their electricity consumption at around 415 terawatt hours globally, roughly 1.5 percent of total consumption in 2024. And the Environmental and Energy Study Institute says that giant data centers can use as much as five million gallons per day for cooling.
With demand for computing resources growing by the day, specifically for the reason that rapid adoption of resource-guzzling generative AI across the economy, this threatens to turn into an unsustainable burden on the planet.
But a brand new paper in Nature Electronics by scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore suggests that hosting data centers in space could provide a possible solution. By counting on the abundant solar energy available in orbit and releasing waste heat into the cold vacuum of space, these facilities could, in principle, turn into carbon neutral.
“Space offers a real sustainable environment for computing,” Wen Yonggang, lead creator of the study, said in a press release. “By harnessing the sun’s energy and the cold vacuum of space, orbital data centers could transform global computing.”
To validate their proposal, the researchers used digital-twin simulations of orbital computing systems to model how they’d generate power, manage heat, and maintain connectivity. The team investigated two potential architectures: one designed to cut back the footprint of knowledge collected by satellites themselves and one other that will receive data from Earth for processing.
The primary model would involve integrating data processing capabilities into satellites equipped with sensors—for instance, cameras for imaging the Earth. This could make it possible to perform expensive computations on the info on board before transmitting just the outcomes back to the bottom, moderately than processing the raw data in terrestrial data centers.
The opposite approach involves a constellation of satellites equipped with full servers that would receive data from Earth and coordinate to perform complex computing tasks like training AI models or running large simulations. The researchers note that this sort of distributed data center architecture—versus assembling a big, monolithic data center in orbit—is technologically feasible with today’s satellite and computing technologies.
The team’s evaluation suggests that the considerable carbon footprint of launching hardware into space might be offset inside five years of operation, after which the facilities could run indefinitely on renewable energy.
Significant technical and logistical hurdles remain. Computer chips are vulnerable to radiation, an ever-present danger in space, which might necessitate the usage of specialized radiation-hardened processors. Long-term maintenance of the facilities would also require in-orbit servicing technologies that don’t yet exist. And as computing technologies rapidly improve, chips depreciate in only a couple of years. Keeping orbital data centers stocked with the most recent and best might be costly.
However the NTU team isn’t the primary to drift the concept of shifting computing facilities into space. Last yr, French defense and aerospace giant Thales published a study exploring the feasibility of the concept. And next month, the startup Starcloud will launch a satellite carrying an Nvidia H100 GPU as a primary step towards making a network of orbital data centers.
While realizing the vision is more likely to require technical breakthroughs and an enormous amount of investment, one solution to computing’s ever growing carbon footprint could also be above our heads.