November 7, 2025 | The AI Boom Launches Into Space

EVOLUTION OR DELUSION?

The latest big idea from the AI boom takes flight—literally.

Moving artificial intelligence computation into low-orbit space might be the craziest idea yet to emerge from the AI bubble that refuses to burst.

The logic is simple—and sounds insane. AI data centers devour power, and the grid can’t keep up. So, the next frontier is space, where the sun never sets and solar rays pour in continuously. Up there, heat can radiate into the void, and no one needs to beg for more transmission lines.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella recently complained that his company has racks of AI GPUs sitting idle—not because of software shortages, but because there isn’t enough electricity to run them. “We don’t have the power or the grid,” he said on November 2. Industry forecasts suggest that by 2030, AI workloads will require four times the current global data-center power supply.

That kind of scarcity has billionaires dreaming skyward. Jeff Bezos predicts gigawatt-scale orbital data centers within 10 to 20 years. China is already deep into the race: it plans 2,800 AI satellites and is building a 12-satellite “supercomputer” in space, each running an eight-billion-parameter model. At home, China is also sprinting ahead in nuclear power—30 reactors under construction and 10 more approved this spring for $28 billion. The AI race and the power race are merging into one.

Not to ever be outdone, Elon Musk claims that Space-X will be doing data centers in space, along with the next generation Starlink satellites V3. And Musk has the advantage of a rocket launch business and a satellite network already in place.

Google, never one to be grounded, has its own plan. “Project Suncatcher,” officially a research effort, will deploy solar-powered satellites loaded with Tensor Processing Units starting in 2027. CEO Sundar Pichai highlights the math: solar energy in orbit is constant, roughly eight times what we can harvest on Earth.

But the challenges are cosmic. Radiation, extreme temperatures, orbital debris, and the staggering cost of lifting thousands of tons into orbit—all before figuring out how to beam petabytes of data back down fast enough to be useful.

Still, the idea won’t die. Compared with the billions needed to rebuild electrical grids on Earth, space can start to look, strangely, like the cheaper option.

The question is whether this represents genuine innovation—or another case of Silicon Valley (and now Beijing) losing its tether to reality. Either way, the AI bubble keeps inflating, now expanding into outer space.

Hilliard MacBeth

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Hilliard MacBeth November 7th, 2025

Posted In: Hilliard's Weekend Notebook

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