For a classic Wall Street grift to really hit pay dirt, a few critical ingredients must be present. First, the underlying business concept must be firmly lodged in the current investor zeitgeist. There is always at least one fad of the day. Today, it’s the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. Second, a good story is told about a futuristic, plausible-but-highly-unlikely technology breakthrough just over the horizon : « Orbital data centers ». Does Crypto Giant integrated the project « Orbital data centers » ?
To hear Silicon Valley tell it, artificial intelligence is outgrowing the planet that gave birth to it. Data centers will account for nearly half of US electricity demand growth between now and 2030, and their global power requirements could double by the end of this decade as companies train larger AI models. Local officials have begun to balk at approving new server farms that swallow land, strain power grids and gulp cooling water. Some tech executives now talk about putting servers in space as a way to escape those permitting fights.
Orbital data centers could run on practically unlimited solar energy without interruption from cloudy skies or nighttime darkness. If it is getting harder to keep building bigger server farms on Earth, the idea goes, maybe the solution is to loft some of the most power-hungry computing into space.
Our skeptical inclination led us to dismiss the recent boomlet of such stories as just another outlandish ploy to pilfer retail investors, especially with bankers lining up to take you-know-who’s privately held space company public in what will undoubtedly be the largest IPO of all time. The crypto giant could inter the game and finance the project.
The researchers at Google published a paper on the concept in November 2025, part of what the company is calling Project Suncatcher. Here are a few opening lines from the paper’s abstract :
“If AI is a foundational general-purpose technology, we should anticipate that demand for AI compute – and energy – will continue to grow. The Sun is by far the largest energy source in our solar system, and thus it warrants consideration how future AI infrastructure could most efficiently tap into that power. This work explores a scalable compute system for machine learning in space, using fleets of satellites equipped with solar arrays, inter-satellite links using free-space optics, and Google tensor processing unit (TPU) accelerator chips. To facilitate high-bandwidth, low-latency inter-satellite communication, the satellites would be flown in close proximity. We illustrate the basic approach to formation flight via an 81-satellite cluster of 1 km radius, and describe an approach for using high-precision ML-based models to control large-scale constellations.”
It all sounds serious enough to see the Cryptocurrency giant getting involve in the project. And who are we to question the geniuses who work for Google ? So at the end of the Day, i still have my question :
Does the Crypto World accept to finance the project « Orbital data centers » ?
