Musk vows to put data centers in space and run them on solar power but
experts have their doubts
[February 05, 2026] By
BERNARD CONDON and MATT O'BRIEN
NEW YORK (AP) — Elon Musk vowed this week to upend another industry just
as he did with cars and rockets — and once again he's taking on long
odds.
The world's richest man said he wants to put as many as a million
satellites into orbit to form vast, solar-powered data centers in space
— a move to allow expanded use of artificial intelligence and chatbots
without triggering blackouts and sending utility bills soaring.
To finance that effort, Musk combined SpaceX with his AI business on
Monday and plans a big initial public offering of the combined company.
“Space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale,” Musk wrote on
SpaceX’s website Monday, adding about his solar ambitions, “It’s always
sunny in space!”
But scientists and industry experts say even Musk — who outsmarted
Detroit to turn Tesla into the world’s most valuable automaker — faces
formidable technical, financial and environmental obstacles.
Here’s a look:
Feeling the heat
Capturing the sun’s energy from space to run chatbots and other AI tools
would ease pressure on power grids and cut demand for sprawling
computing warehouses that are consuming farms and forests and vast
amounts of water to cool.
But space presents its own set of problems.
Data centers generate enormous heat. Space seems to offer a solution
because it is cold. But it is also a vacuum, trapping heat inside
objects in the same way that a Thermos keeps coffee hot using double
walls with no air between them.
“An uncooled computer chip in space would overheat and melt much faster
than one on Earth,” said Josep Jornet, a computer and electrical
engineering professor at Northeastern University.
One fix is to build giant radiator panels that glow in infrared light to
push the heat “out into the dark void,” says Jornet, noting that the
technology has worked on a small scale, including on the International
Space Station. But for Musk's data centers, he says, it would require an
array of “massive, fragile structures that have never been built
before.”
Musk is undaunted.
“You can mark my words,” Musk said in a preview of a Cheeky Pint podcast
episode airing Thursday. “In 36 months, but probably closer to 30
months, the most economically compelling place to put AI will be space.
And then it will get ridiculously better to be in space.”
Floating debris
Then there is space junk.
A single malfunctioning satellite breaking down or losing orbit could
trigger a cascade of collisions, potentially disrupting emergency
communications, weather forecasting and other services.
Musk noted in a recent regulatory filing that he has had only one
“low-velocity debris generating event" in seven years running Starlink,
his satellite communications network. Starlink has operated about 10,000
satellites — but that's a fraction of the million or so he now plans to
put in space.
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A SpaceX logo is displayed on a building, May 26, 2020, at the
Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP Photo/David J.
Phillip, File)
 “We could reach a tipping point
where the chance of collision is going to be too great," said
University at Buffalo's John Crassidis, a former NASA engineer. “And
these objects are going fast -- 17,500 miles per hour. There could
be very violent collisions."
No repair crews
Even without collisions, satellites fail, chips degrade, parts
break.
Special GPU graphics chips used by AI companies, for instance, can
become damaged and need to be replaced.
“On Earth, what you would do is send someone down to the data
center," said Baiju Bhatt, CEO of Aetherflux, a space-based solar
energy company. "You replace the server, you replace the GPU, you’d
do some surgery on that thing and you’d slide it back in.”
But no such repair crew exists in orbit, and those GPUs in space
could get damaged due to their exposure to high-energy particles
from the sun.
Bhatt says one workaround is to overprovision the satellite with
extra chips to replace the ones that fail. But that’s an expensive
proposition given they are likely to cost tens of thousands of
dollars each, and current Starlink satellites only have a lifespan
of about five years.
Competition — and leverage
Musk is not alone trying to solve these problems.
A company in Redmond, Washington, called Starcloud, launched a
satellite in November carrying a single Nvidia-made AI computer chip
to test out how it would fare in space. Google is exploring orbital
data centers in a venture it calls Project Suncatcher. And Jeff
Bezos’ Blue Origin announced plans in January for a constellation of
more than 5,000 satellites to start launching late next year, though
its focus has been more on communications than AI.
Still, Musk has an edge: He's got rockets.
Starcloud had to use one of his Falcon rockets to put its chip in
space last year. Aetherflux plans to send a set of chips it calls a
Galactic Brain to space on a SpaceX rocket later this year. And
Google may also need to turn to Musk to get its first two planned
prototype satellites off the ground by early next year.
Pierre Lionnet, a research director at the trade association
Eurospace, says Musk routinely charges rivals far more than he
charges himself —- as much as $20,000 per kilo of payload versus
$2,000 internally.
He said Musk’s announcements this week signal that he plans to use
that advantage to win this new space race.
“When he says we are going to put these data centers in space, it’s
a way of telling the others we will keep these low launch costs for
myself,” said Lionnet. “It’s a kind of powerplay.”
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