Further, in the western world, new large-scale projects can take a decade or more to complete because of many requirements around permits, restrictions, rights of way, and environmental factors.
“The central problem that should concern the leaders of tech companies is our inability to build,” noted Josh Smith, energy policy lead at The Abundance Institute. “ A cleaner future will be possible only by speeding up.”
Looking to space, Lumen said it has developed a range of concept designs and hasn’t discovered any “insurmountable obstacles.”
“Orbital data centers unlock next-generation clusters of a scale not seen yet on Earth, with power generation well into the GW range,” the company noted. “Space-grade data centers will be attractive for organizations that train very large AI models that could vastly exceed in size AI models trained on terrestrial data centers.”
‘Orders of magnitude’ lower costs
Orbital data centers will run on “abundant solar energy without batteries,” Lumen Orbit pointed out, using 24/7 solar energy and passive cooling unhindered by day/night cycles or weather.
This enables “orders of magnitude lower marginal energy costs,” the company wrote. For instance, a single 40MW cluster operated for 10 years in space would cost $8.2 million ($5 million for launch; $2 million for the solar array; and $1.2 million for 1 kilogram of shielding per kilowatt of compute and $30 a kilogram launch cost).
