Future Data Centers Could Orbit Earth, Powered by the Sun and Cooled by the Vacuum of Space

As global demand for computing continues to explode, the carbon footprint of data centers is a growing concern. A 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 cool the millions of chips housed within 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 large data centers can use as much as five million gallons per day for cooling.

With demand for computing resources growing by the day, in particular since the rapid adoption of resource-guzzling generative AI across the economy, this threatens to become an unsustainable burden on the planet.

But a new paper in Nature Electronics by scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore suggests that hosting data centers in space could provide a potential solution. By relying on the abundant solar energy available in orbit and releasing waste heat into the cold vacuum of space, these facilities could, in principle, become carbon neutral.

“Space offers a true sustainable environment for computing,” Wen Yonggang, lead author 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 would generate power, manage heat, and maintain connectivity. The team investigated two potential architectures: one designed to reduce the footprint of data collected by satellites themselves and another that would receive data from Earth for processing.

The first model would involve integrating data processing capabilities into satellites equipped with sensors—for example, cameras for imaging the Earth. This would make it possible to carry out expensive computations on the data on board before transmitting just the results back to the ground, rather than processing the raw data in terrestrial data centers.