A startup developing technologies to harness solar power in space is throwing its hat in with big tech companies attempting to build out data centers that orbit Earth. The US-based company, Aetherflux, announced on Tuesday that it plans to launch its first data center satellite in early 2027 — the first piece of a larger constellation of satellites it’s calling the “Galactic Brain.”

Tech companies are running into physical limits to their AI ambitions on Earth — namely needing more space and electricity for data centers. One potential solution they’re exploring is to try sending some of those data centers into orbit, where they could run on solar energy around-the-clock.

“The elephant in the room is that our current energy plans simply won’t get us there fast enough.”

“The race for artificial general intelligence is fundamentally a race for compute capacity, and by extension, energy. The elephant in the room is that our current energy plans simply won’t get us there fast enough,” Baiju Bhatt, founder and CEO of Aetherflux — who also co-founded Robinhood — says in a press release. “Galactic Brain puts the sunlight next to the silicon and skips the power grid entirely.”

Aetherflux faces competition from Google, Blue Origin, and SpaceX, which are also studying the feasibility of orbital data center satellites. Outfitted with photovoltaic panels, they’d be able to run on solar power without having to deal with a setting sun. Aetherflux says its technology builds on its existing efforts to deploy satellites that can beam solar energy down to Earth via lasers.

Google published a preprint paper in November about its ‘moonshot’ plan to launch AI chips into space on solar-powered satellites, which it’s calling Project Suncatcher. Jeff Bezos has said he’s optimistic about large data centers operating in space over the next decade or two, a goal his company Blue Origin has been working on over the past year, the Wall Street Journal reports. Elon Musk, meanwhile, is reportedly working toward using Starlink satellites for AI compute workloads.

Google, Amazon, and Musk’s xAI have all faced resistance to data center projects on land. There’s growing backlash over how much electricity the facilities consume, which can lead to higher electricity rates and more pollution from new gas infrastructure installed to meet rising power demand. Earthbound data centers can also require a lot of water for cooling systems, another problem Aetherflux and others hope to avoid in orbit. Those concerns have fueled local opposition to projects across the US, where dozens of data center projects have been blocked or delayed since 2023 after facing local opposition. Limits on electricity generation have become the “prime inhibitor” of data center growth around the world, according to commercial real estate giant CBRE.

There are other challenges Aetherflux and its competitors will face before data centers can start orbiting Earth. While launch costs have decreased over the years, it’s still prohibitively expensive to launch and operate these things in space. They’ll also have to ensure that AI chips can withstand higher radiation and avoid collisions with other satellites in orbit as space gets more crowded.

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• Justine Calma