AI companies are racing to move their computing infrastructure into orbit, but a closer look at the full life cycle of those plans reveals significant environmental costs that boosters have not fully addressed.
Elon Musk's SpaceX has applied to launch over a million AI data center satellites and ultimately build them on the moon, according to a report by Phys.org. Jeff Bezos, Google, OpenAI and others have similar plans. The core argument is that space offers 24/7 solar energy and, in Bezos's vision, a way to move all polluting industries off-world and rezone Earth for humans and nature.
The idea of off-worlding polluting industries is not new. In the 1970s, when an Iranian oil crisis drove up fuel prices, NASA developed a plan to build large solar plants in space. That plan collapsed when oil prices fell again. NASA also explored storing nuclear materials on the moon and launching hazardous waste toward the sun. Those plans were considered feasible from an engineering standpoint but were politically impossible because of the risk of radioactive particles falling back to Earth.
Today, the renewed interest is driven by the energy demands of artificial intelligence. Regular Earth-based data centers were responsible for around 5% of all electricity used in the U.S. last year, mostly using fossil fuels. Their share of U.S. power demand will likely triple by 2028. That scale of energy consumption has put orbital solar power back on the table as a possible alternative.
SpaceX has submitted planning applications that include assurances of no meaningful environmental impact. Musk has said that "it's always sunny in space" and that orbital data centers are "obviously the only way to scale." But critics are pushing back on those assurances.
A recent petition from Earthjustice, an environmental law charity, is calling for a comprehensive review of these proposals. The petition argues the plans fail to acknowledge any environmental impact. "This is not just poor planning and a missed opportunity," the petition states, "it violates federal law."
The technical challenges in space also complicate the environmental case. Unlike on Earth, where air and water carry heat away from computing hardware, space behaves more like a Thermos flask. There is no atmosphere to dissipate heat. Keeping powerful AI chips cool in orbit requires massive ammonia-filled radiators that release heat as infrared radiation. The process is not very efficient, and those radiators are much larger than the computers they cool. Lifting those structures into orbit requires large amounts of rocket fuel.
Most plans for orbital data centers depend on the future success of SpaceX's heavy-lift Starship rocket. Every Starship launch burns over 1,000 metric tons of fuel, and launching the volume of hardware required for meaningful computing capacity in space would require an enormous number of those launches. The water and rocket fuel used in launches, combined with the challenge of eventually disposing of old satellites, adds layers of environmental cost that are largely absent from current industry projections.
The debate is unfolding as regulators and environmental groups begin to push for more accountability from the companies involved. Earthjustice's petition puts federal law at the center of that argument, contending that existing legal requirements for environmental review have not been met. Whether regulators respond to that pressure could shape whether these orbital ambitions move forward on the timeline companies are projecting.
