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AI Orbital Data Centers

By Gary Kirkpatrick, Senior Technical Leader, Belcan Consulting

The goal of this article is to describe how leading Space industry experts are addressing the technical challenges and to gain a clear picture of some of the many new competitors in this race to bring space-based data centers to reality.

The topic of AI Data Centers in Space has recently been dominating the news headlines within the Space and AI Tech industries. Jensen Huang of Nvidia recently announced at the development of Vera Rubin Space-1 GPU which is a radiation hardened GPU chip specifically designed to operate in the harsh space environment. In addition to this new “space tolerant” chip development there have been multiple FCC filings for large satellite constellations from SpaceX, Blue Origin, Google and Starcloud to mention just a few. These recent developments have ignited interest in this innovative alternative to terrestrial data centers.

The recent successful SpaceX IPO has really increased the industry chatter and technical acceptance of the reality of Data Centers in Space. Elon Musk has embraced the ODC concept and if you read the SpaceX IPO S1 filling document with the SEC it is obvious that this is a new technology is a central figure in the overall massive IPO valuation of approximately $1.7 trillion dollars. SpaceX and Elon Musk are leading the way and has already published preliminary designs for a satellite specifically designed for space-based orbital data centers. The figure below depicts the basic design for the “AI1” satellite that SpaceX is working on and will be launching sometime in the next couple of years.