We're about to hit a wall with traditional data centers, and the answer might be 384,400 kilometers away. We're about to hit a wall with traditional data centers, and the answer might be 384,400 kilometers away The cloud used to be just a metaphor; a way to talk about all those data centers buzzing away around the world. But soon, that might change in a big way. With AI models ballooning into the trillions of parameters and our power grids starting to buckle under the weight, some people are thinking way outside the box. Why not push computation off the planet altogether? Imagine running all that data in space. Recently Jeff Bezos predicted that, within a decade or two, we’ll see gigawatt-scale data centers in orbit, vast computing platforms circling the Earth, powered directly by sunlight.Today, global data centers consume roughly 2% of the world’s electricity; approximately the same as the entire airline industry. And that demand is expected to double or even triple within the next decade. powered directly by sunlight powered directly by sunlight expected to double expected to double Current state: scaling compute, data centers and national strategy Current state: scaling compute, data centers and national strategy Before we jump to the void, let’s anchor ourselves in the present. The United States, for one, is investing heavily in AI infrastructure. In January 2025, the U.S. announced a private-sector initiative led by OpenAI, Oracle Corporation and SoftBank Group, as “Stargate”, aimed at building up to US $500 billion in AI-data-centre infrastructure over four years. The goal: tens of gigawatts of compute, massive campuses, and strategic primacy in frontier AI. On the government side, the United States Space Force (USSF) published its FY2025 Data and AI Strategic Action Plan, acknowledging that “in the contested and congested space domain … superiority will be defined by our ability to integrate … data capabilities, real-time analytics, and emerging AI technologies.” US $500 billion US $500 billion Data and AI Strategic Action Plan Data and AI Strategic Action Plan The Latency Problem: When Speed of Light Becomes Your Bottleneck The Latency Problem: When Speed of Light Becomes Your Bottleneck Let’s talk about the biggest roadblock first: distance. Down here on Earth, we’re obsessed with squeezing every last bit of speed out of our networks. AWS brags about single-digit millisecond latency between their zones. We tinker with TCP stacks, pour money into custom hardware, and lay down endless fiber just to shave off a few microseconds. In space, physics doesn't care about our optimization tricks. Light travels at almost 300,000 kilometers per second.. A signal from Earth to the Moon takes at least 1.28 seconds to get there. Try Mars when it’s nearby, and you’re looking at a one-way trip of about three minutes. You can’t fix that with better cables or smarter software. This isn’t a networking problem; it’s the universe telling us, “Good luck.” Traditional distributed training just falls apart in situations like this. The usual parameter server setups expect workers to sync gradients all the time. With a big language model, you’d typically sync after every batch or maybe every few batches. But when each sync takes several seconds, your GPUs end up twiddling their thumbs instead of actually working. Settling for slower training isn’t the answer. We’ve got to completely rethink how we build AI systems to handle high-latency environments. Asynchronous Everything: Embracing Stale Gradients Asynchronous Everything: Embracing Stale Gradients Let’s talk about asynchronous training with stale gradients. The basic idea? Stop waiting around for everything to sync up. Each compute node just updates the model using whatever gradients it has on hand even if they’re a bit old. Honestly, this isn’t some brand-new trick. People have been looking into asynchronous SGD since way back in the 1980s. But if you’re working in space, you don’t really have a choice anymore. The real issue is making sure your model still converges when your gradient info is delayed by seconds or even minutes. But here’s the good part: in space, the delay isn’t just random. It’s actually pretty predictable. If you know the satellite orbits and when you can talk to each node, you can figure out exactly how stale those gradients will be. That means you can design optimization algorithms that handle staleness directly like tweaking learning rates based on the timing you already know.                                                                                            Reference Reference Research from 2023 shows that delay-tolerant federated learning actually works, even when updates are pretty stale—as long as you tweak the optimization algorithm. In space, you can’t just set a learning rate and forget it. You have to adjust it on the fly, not just based on training progress, but also on all that lag from slow communication. Research from 2023 Research from 2023 Data Storage: Bits in a Radiation Storm Data Storage: Bits in a Radiation Storm Now, storage in space is a whole different beast. On Earth, we worry about hard drives failing or the slow creep of bit rot. Up there, ionizing radiation is constantly messing with your data. One cosmic ray, and suddenly a memory cell flips from 0 to 1 or the other way around. In low Earth orbit, you might see one of these single-event upsets hit every gigabyte of memory, every single day. The Moon? It’s even rougher no magnetic field to offer much protection. And during solar storms, those numbers just shoot up. Sure, error-correcting codes help, but they aren’t free. For every byte you want to store safely, you could end up burning two or three extra bytes just for redundancy. This isn’t just about storage space, either every extra byte is something you have to send over those slow, expensive space links. So, what’s the fix? You build data structures that actually know about radiation risk. Not all data needs the same level of protection. The stuff that barely ever changes, like model weights? Give those the strongest error correction you’ve got. Temporary data, like intermediate activations? Go easy. Maybe accept that you’ll lose a few bits here and there and just recompute them if needed. That way, you save bandwidth and storage for the stuff that really matters. Some research groups are exploring self-healing data structures that continuously verify and correct themselves in the background. The idea is similar to how DNA has repair mechanisms instead of waiting for corruption to cause a failure, you're constantly scanning and fixing. Compute Architecture: GPUs in the Void Compute Architecture: GPUs in the Void Training neural networks in space isn’t easy. You’re sticking GPUs out where they were never meant to run. In data centers on Earth, GPUs get plenty of cooling, steady power, and barely any radiation to worry about. Space? Forget it. None of that holds true. The worst problem is heat. Here, we just blow fans or pump liquid to cool chips down. Up there, in a vacuum, air isn’t an option, and liquids act weird in micro gravity. So, you rely on radiation cooling - just tossing heat out as infrared light. It’s slow, and you need big radiator panels to pull it off. Power’s a headache too. Solar panels feed you energy, but how much you get depends on where you are and how you’re angled toward the sun. Batteries can pick up the slack, but they’re heavy, and that’s a pain for rockets. If you try to run a data center on the Moon, good luck: you’ll face two weeks straight of darkness. So, you either shut everything down for half the month or you go overboard with solar panels and batteries. Neither option is pretty. Commercial GPUs just can’t handle the kind of radiation you get in space unless you tweak them. You have to use parts built to survive that environment, and honestly, those are pretty outdated think more like 2015 tech, not anything cutting-edge. One interesting workaround? Stick with regular hardware, but add a ton of backup and nonstop error checking. Basically, you run every calculation three times and see which answer pops up twice. Sure, it’s not efficient, but it ends up costing less than designing special radiation-proof chips from scratch. The Case for Edge Intelligence: Processing at the Source The Case for Edge Intelligence: Processing at the Source With all these limitations, it makes way more sense to bring AI processing right to where the data is, instead of sending everything to some distant hub. Say you’re running a mining operation on the Moon process the data there. Don’t bother sending every bit of raw sensor info all the way back to Earth or a big data center. It’s a lot like what we see with edge computing here at home, just cranked up to another level. Every gigabyte you send through space eats up power, time, and a lot of expensive infrastructure. By turning raw data into insights right on the spot, you end up saving a ton. Picture a lunar rover with built-in vision models. It can navigate and do science on its own, crunching images right there on the Moon. Instead of beaming back raw photos, it just sends the important stuff a much smaller package. The heavy training for these models happens on Earth and gets sent over once, but the day-to-day work all happens on the rover. Of course, this means we have to rethink how we build these models. They need to run on hardware that can handle the rough conditions in space, shrug off the occasional blast of radiation, and keep working even if the connection to home drops out for a while. Data Transmission: Every Bit Is Precious Data Transmission: Every Bit Is Precious Space doesn’t exactly have endless bandwidth. Even the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which is basically a heavy hitter up there tops out at around 6 megabits per second. Honestly, that’s slower than your old-school DSL from the early 2000s. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Now, when you’ve got AI systems collecting mountains of data like think sensors, cameras, all sorts of scientific gadgets. You can’t just shove everything into the cloud like you do at home. The pipe is just too narrow. So what do you do? You get creative. Aggressive data compression and smart filtering come into play. Instead of sending back every scrap of data, you pick and choose. Only the data that’s actually useful for science or operations gets through. The AI at the source acts like a really picky editor, deciding what’s worth saving and what’s just noise. This actually flips the usual approach. Normally, you’d collect everything first, then sift through it later to find the good stuff. In space, you have to analyze on the fly and only keep what matters. You lose some details, sure, but you don’t really have a choice. That’s where learned compression shines. Neural networks can be trained to handle specific types of data way better than your standard off-the-shelf algorithms. You train a model on Earth, send it up, and suddenly you’re getting 10 or even 100 times better compression at least for the kind of data you care about. In a place where every bit counts, that makes all the difference. Orbital Dynamics and Data Choreography Orbital Dynamics and Data Choreography Here's something non-obvious: the physical movement of spacecraft and satellites matters for data infrastructure. In low Earth orbit, satellites zip overhead and disappear below the horizon in minutes. Communication windows are brief and intermittent. This creates a data choreography problem. You need to time data transfers with orbital mechanics. When will the next communication window open? How much data can you transmit before the satellite passes out of range? Should you buffer more data and wait for a better opportunity, or transmit now with higher error rates? For a distributed AI system with components in different orbits, this becomes even more complex. Your parameter server might be in a higher orbit with longer communication windows but higher latency. Your worker nodes might be in lower orbits with frequent but brief connectivity. You end up designing your data movement around orbital mechanics as much as around computational needs. It's like distributed systems engineering, but where the network topology literally revolves around you. Building the Foundation Today Building the Foundation Today None of this gets off the ground without serious groundwork now. Right now, research teams and companies are already piecing things together. SpaceX is sending up compute payloads for on-orbit processing. NASA’s throwing money at space-ready AI hardware. Academic groups keep cranking out papers on delay-tolerant federated learning. But honestly, we’re still just getting started. Real space-based AI data infrastructure? That’s probably at least ten years out. What we build in the next few years decides if that future looks like the cloud systems we know on Earth or if we end up with something totally different. Conclusion: Constraints Drive Innovation Conclusion: Constraints Drive Innovation Space forces us to deal with problems we’ve already solved down here. Latency stretches into seconds, not milliseconds. Radiation messes with our data. Communication bandwidth drops to megabits. And forget about reliable power and cooling those depend on where you are in orbit. It sounds limiting, but these challenges push us to get creative. Asynchronous training algorithms made for space could actually improve federated learning on Earth. Data structures that can shrug off radiation might lead to tougher storage systems everywhere. Compression tricks meant for tight bandwidth could find a home in edge computing. The old playbook for building AI infrastructure won’t cut it out there. We need new designs, new algorithms, and a fresh way of thinking about distributed AI. And while we’re figuring out how to make AI work off-planet, we might just end up with better AI systems right here at home.

SoftBank

Building AI Data Infrastructure in Space: Why Earth's Playbook Won't Work

About Author

Comments

TOPICS

THIS ARTICLE WAS FEATURED IN

Related Stories

Prompt Engineering Will Always Matter (Just Not How You Think)

Prompt Engineering Will Always Matter (Just Not How You Think)

Synthetic Data Isn’t Fake. It’s the Future of Private, Scalable AI

The Next Security Perimeter: Defending Enterprises from Agentic AI Threats

AI Adoption In Space Explorations

AI and the Future of Space Exploration

Prompt Engineering Will Always Matter (Just Not How You Think)

Prompt Engineering Will Always Matter (Just Not How You Think)

Synthetic Data Isn’t Fake. It’s the Future of Private, Scalable AI

The Next Security Perimeter: Defending Enterprises from Agentic AI Threats

AI Adoption In Space Explorations

AI and the Future of Space Exploration

Light-Mode

Classic

Newspaper

Minty

Dark-Mode

Neon Noir

Minty

HN StartUps