Frequently asked questions about data centres in space

No. There are currently no full-scale commercial data centres operating in space. There are plenty of satellites and space hardware with onboard computers, but nothing resembling an AWS/Azure/Google-style facility dedicated to hosting general-purpose compute or storage for customers.

Potential uses include processing data from Earth-observation satellites in orbit, providing compute close to space infrastructure (like lunar bases or deep-space missions), military and intelligence applications, and experimental high-availability systems that are physically off-planet.

It’s a common misconception. Space is a vacuum, which makes convection cooling impossible. On Earth, your data centre dumps heat into the air or water. In space, you mostly rely on radiation via large radiators, which is technically challenging, heavy, and expensive.

Candidates could include large cloud providers partnering with space companies, national space agencies, defence organizations, or startups focused on orbital infrastructure. For now, most activity is still at the research, proposal, or small-scale experiment stage.

It’s complicated. You could theoretically power orbital infrastructure with abundant solar energy, but launches have an environmental cost, and building/maintaining hardware in space is resource-intensive. Whether this is net-positive for the planet depends on the scale, technology, and alternatives on Earth.

Latency depends on orbit and use case. For many typical web or app workloads, a data centre in space would introduce more latency than a well-placed terrestrial region. Space data centres make more sense for workloads tied to space assets, or specialised tasks where physical location is an advantage.

No one knows for sure. Some proposals suggest early prototypes could appear in the next decade, but it depends on launch costs, business models, regulatory frameworks, and whether anyone finds a compelling use case that justifies the cost.

No. datacentresinspace.com is an independent project created to track and explain the idea of off-planet compute. If a genuine space data centre is launched, this counter is the first thing we’ll update.