Tag: orbital-data-centers
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From Server Racks to Constellation-Scale Computing Networks
Launch costs and heat rejection are two of the biggest expenses facing orbital data centers. At the engineering level, the challenge comes down to four interconnected questions: how to power an orbital server rack, remove its waste heat, keep it operating through faults, and schedule workloads when that rack becomes a network of 100 or…
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Orbital Data Centers: The Economics of Moving Computing Into Space
Moving a data center into space sounds like science fiction. But by 2026, a satellite carrying an NVIDIA H100 GPU has already trained an AI model in orbit, and investors have valued the company behind it at $2.3 billion. This article examines the accounting: where revenue comes from, where costs accumulate, and what it would…
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Onboard Intelligence, Space Data Processing in Orbit and Earth Data Processing in Orbit: Which Will Succeed First?
Space computing covers three distinct approaches: satellites that process their own observations, constellations that share computing tasks in orbit, and orbital infrastructure designed to handle workloads originating on Earth. They share a label, but their technical requirements and commercial readiness differ substantially. This lesson maps out the three approaches, making it easier to understand where…
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Cowboy Space Takes 291,035-Square-Foot Seattle-Area Site for Orbital Data Center and Rocket Production
Cowboy Space has leased a 291,035-square-foot industrial facility in Kent, Washington, to manufacture rockets and spacecraft for its proposed Stampede orbital AI data center constellation, giving the California-based startup a large production base near Seattle’s established aerospace workforce. Newmark, which arranged the transaction for landlord CenterPoint Properties, said the agreement is the largest industrial lease…
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Polish Startup Ares Shield to Protect Orbital Data Centers With High-Power Microwave Defense
Florida-based Lonestar Data Holdings has contracted Polish defense startup Ares Shield to protect its planned orbital data-center network, marking an unusual convergence of commercial space infrastructure and non-kinetic satellite defense. The agreement, announced Aug. 25, is valued at up to $6 million and initially covers three Lonestar satellites. Ares Shield plans to deliver the first…
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Ares Shield Wins Initial Contract to Protect Lonestar’s Orbital Data Center Satellites
Florida-based Lonestar Data Holdings has selected Polish space security startup Ares Shield to provide protective systems for satellites supporting the company’s emerging orbital data storage infrastructure, marking one of the first publicly disclosed commercial agreements focused specifically on active satellite protection for space-based data centers. Under the agreement, Ares Shield will initially equip three Lonestar…
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China’s Space Computing Is Not the Same as Musk’s Vision
Over the past year, space computing has emerged as one of the hottest topics in the global commercial space industry. From a wave of domestic companies announcing plans for computing satellites, computing constellations, and space-based computing platforms, to SpaceX’s continued discussions around orbital data centers and AI infrastructure, space computing has quickly become a new…
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China’s Space Computing Race: Competing for the Next Decade’s AI Compute Power
AI’s computing needs are outgrowing what Earth can easily supply — and a new race is emerging to move data centers into orbit. This report breaks down the emerging “space computing” industry from every angle: what it actually is and why energy and bandwidth constraints are pushing computing into space (Sections 1–2); the physical advantages…
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A Million Satellites Could Create a Visible Ring Around Earth
Will Orbital Data Centers Create a Permanent Artificial Ring Around Earth? More than a million data center satellites and 50,000 space mirrors, if launched as currently proposed, would concentrate into a single orbital plane visible as a luminous band spanning the entire sky — brighter than any star or planet, and according to researchers, potentially…
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How hard is it to build orbital data centers, actually?
Editor’s note: This is the second of three feature articles Ars is publishing to explore the financial, technical, and competitive dimensions of orbital data centers. Although the idea of putting data centers into space has long been discussed on a theoretical basis, the technology has rapidly become a red-hot topic. This series attempts to ground-truth…