Mark Zuckerberg made waves last month when Meta announced an audacious plan to fund the construction of a fleet of nuclear reactors to power its data centres. A few months before, Microsoft’s boss, Satya Nadella, had said that the $3 trillion tech giant would revive a reactor at the defunct Three Mile Island nuclear power station in Pennsylvania, as part of its effort to find the clean, cheap electricity required to run its artificial intelligence models.
Philip Johnston has a better idea. The 38-year-old entrepreneur, from Elstead in Surrey, said they should put their power plants — and data centres — in space.
Johnston runs a start-up called Lumen Orbit, based in Redmond, Washington, which last month raised $11 million (£9 million) to become the first company to put a data centre into orbit. The vision of he and his co-founders — Ezra Feilden, an Imperial College London PhD in materials engineering, and former SpaceX software engineer Adi Oltean — is ambitious.
Their design calls for a cluster of shipping container-style boxes packed with high-speed AI chips. These would be anchored at the centre of a 16 sq km array of solar panels generating up to five gigawatts of power — about 25 per cent more than Drax, Britain’s biggest power station. The mammoth structure would circle the Earth in “sun synchronous” orbit so that it is never in shade, and beam data via optical space lasers to Starlink satellites, and then down to Earth.
It may sound like a scheme from a mad scientist — Johnston admitted that plenty of venture capitalists gave him “sideways looks” — but he has run the numbers and reckons that it is not only physically possible, but financially lucrative. And it was another Brit-led company — NFX, a San Francisco venture capital firm founded by Pete Flint, a former lastminute.com executive — that led the financing. Flint said: “It’s a crazy idea, but actually, if you extrapolate down the cost curves, and you don’t want these data centres on Earth, why not put them in space with 100 per cent renewable energy, out of sight?”
So how is it possible? The biggest factor is Starship, the 400ft-tall rocket that Elon Musk intends as the workhorse vehicle to move the vast quantities of material and people required to colonise Mars. The ship is the largest man-made flying object, and SpaceX made history in October when a giant tower with a pair of metal “chopsticks” caught the Starship booster as it returned to Earth. By making the rocket fully reusable, Musk reckons he will reduce the cost to launch material into orbit to as little as $30 per kilo, down from as little as $6,000 today. Fifteen years ago, the cost to send one kilo up on the Space Shuttle was $60,000.
“People have no idea what is about to happen in space,” Johnston said. “Asteroid mining is going to be a big business, things like space hotels, manufacturing in space. All of these things become possible when you have low launch costs with huge capacity.”
Indeed, SpaceX is in the midst of constructing a Starship “gigafactory” in Texas to build a fleet that could ultimately handle multiple launches a week.
Back here on Planet Earth, energy demand is exploding as the top tech companies plough hundreds of billions of dollars into power-hungry data centres to run AI models. Within 20 years, nearly half of the planet’s electricity could be sucked up by data centres, according to some estimates. Hence Big Tech’s sudden infatuation with nuclear power.
But building data centres, and indeed giant new power plants, is an expensive, plodding process that often requires years of planning approvals.
Which has led Johnston to look skyward. And it is not just Lumen. This summer, France’s Thales and Leonardo, the Italian defence company, announced the result of a 16-month feasibility study, funded by the European Union, that looked into the environmental and financial viability of building data “clouds in space”. The findings were positive. Christophe Valorge, chief technology officer of Thales, said: “Deploying data centres in space could transform the European digital landscape, offering a more eco-friendly and sovereign solution for hosting and processing data.”
Philip Johnston, chief executive of Lumen Orbit
Sunlight that isn’t dissipated by the atmosphere on Earth is more powerful in space, and by choosing certain orbits, it becomes “baseload”, always-on power — rather than the intermittent source that it is on Earth. Johnston said: “You need eight times less solar in space than terrestrially.” Space is also a chilly -270C, which should in theory make keeping servers cool — a huge challenge for Earth-bound data centres — a bit easier.
The complication is that because there is no air, and thus no convection or conduction, Lumen must design an array of large black panels to absorb heat out of the coolant as it passes through them, and then dissipate it into space through infra-red radiation.
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Johnston reckons that 100 Starship launches would be sufficient to get the modular server farm, the thin film solar panels (either rolled or folded to fit inside the ship) and the rest of the kit necessary for the 5GW data centre he envisions.
Once operational, the electricity would be so cheap — 0.02 cents per kilowatt hour — as to be virtually free, Johnston claimed. Nuclear power typically costs about 5 cents per kilowatt hour, or 25 times as much.
His pitch was enough to get investors to open their cheque books, but the hard part is yet to come. The next milestone is May, when Lumen plans to launch a refrigerator-sized prototype into orbit to show that the concept works. And of course, building a business that is utterly dependent on the timelines set out by Musk is risky. The world’s richest man is notorious for missing deadlines and is also busy with his new job trying to slash the size of the US federal government for president-elect Donald Trump.
But those are worries for another day. Johnston said: “I don’t think anybody believed us until we put a concept video out, and then they were like, ‘Oh shit, you’re actually gonna do this.’ ”
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