It sounds like something from a science fiction movie, but Stephen Eisele is confident that one day his company will open a data centre on the Moon. “The way we see it is that by putting the data centre in space, you’re offering unparalleled security,” says the president of Lonestar Data Holdings.
Last month, the Florida-based firm claimed to have successfully tested a tiny data centre the size of a hardback book that hitched a ride to the Moon on the Athena Lunar Lander from US space exploration firm Intuitive Machines. This, in turn, had been launched by a rocket from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Data centres are the vast warehouses that house stacks of computers that store and process data used by websites, companies, and governments. Lonestar says that putting them on the Moon will offer customers secure, reliable data processing, while taking advantage of unlimited solar energy to power them. And while space-based Data centres may sound far-fetched, it’s an idea that’s starting to take off.
Part of the reason is the rocketing demand and the difficulty of finding suitable sites on Earth.
The ever-expanding use of artificial intelligence (AI) computing has seen a massive increase in the amount of data that needs to be stored and processed around the world. As a result, the need for data centres has shot up too, with annual demand set to rise between 19% and 22% by 2030, according to global management consultants McKinsey. New facilities are springing up all the time – but it’s getting hard to find places to put them. Data centres are large and sprawling, and use enormous amounts of power and water for cooling. And increasingly, local people don’t want them built nearby. Putting data centres in space – either in orbit around Earth, or on the Moon – the theory goes, means they can’t do quite so much harm. There’s more or less unlimited energy available from the sun, for example, and no neighbours to complain about the environmental impacts. Not only that, space-based data centres could specialise in services for spacecraft and other space facilities, with space-to-space data transfers quicker than from the ground. Last summer, a European Commission-funded feasibility study into orbiting data centres published its results. The Ascend report by carried out by Thales Alenia Space – a joint venture between French and Italian aerospace groups Thales and Leonardo – published its results. It determined that deploying data centres in space “could transform the European digital landscape”, and be “more eco-friendly”. Thales Alenia Space envisages building a constellation of 13 satellites measuring a combined 200 m by 80 m, and with a total data processing power of around 10 megawatts (MW). That’s equivalent to a current medium-sized, ground-based data centre, with some 5,000 servers. Based on technologies that already exist or are under development, the satellites would be assembled in orbit.
