Computing · around 2036

Orbital data centres

Projection

Solar-powered compute clusters in orbit run AI workloads with near-continuous sunlight.

In a sun-synchronous orbit, solar panels produce power most of the time and heat radiates to space. Orbital compute could sidestep land, grid and water constraints on data centres.

Why it’s plausible: Launch costs are falling and small orbital compute demos exist; it depends on radiation-tolerant hardware, heat rejection at scale and launch cost per kilogram falling much further.

See it in the living treeWikipedia