I work across the street from the new Indiana Amazon data center. I literally watched this place being built day by day. Unbelievable. The cornfield roads looked like the Dan Ryan. They must have bought every John Deere Gator made in 2025 just for the foreman to drive around the site. There were more equipment vehicles than you’d see at a Caterpillar plant. These guys had to have been given a blank check and told to get it done in a year. Impressive.
Amazing… The speed at which these sites are being built is unbelievable. Mustafa Suleyman from MSFT recently said their Fairwater data center in Atlanta has taken over 15 million labor hours…
Of course orbiting solar-powered data centers can be done, technically. Easy. The problem is with the starry eyed calculations and the failure to calibrate those against Musk's past forecasting accuracy.
Orbiting data centers is merely the latest massive stock fraud peddled to and by futurists to prop up the SpaceX IPO's absurd valuation based on retail investor gullibility and exploiting the bigger fool theory that has so far foiled the Tesla stock shorters, but won't forever.
To put this in more grounded terms, terrestrial solutions for data center power are moving fast along the curve of scale, learning and innovation, and the space based tech has no chance of catching up on cost, even with a trillion dollar SpaceX IPO subsidy. This will go the way of the Boring company.
The earliest project of this type is ServerSky a 15 year old project to put chip sized thinsat server swarms in orbit. Keith Lofstrom http://server-sky.com/ServerSky
Peter, knowing what you do now, having watched “The Age of Disclosure”, how safe is it for us to have so much data in orbit like that? Also, I sure would appreciate you share your thoughts on that documentary in a near-future Moonshots Podcast. Clearly this knowledge changes how we look to the future.
the raw count of data centers can be misleading. A massive hyperscale facility consuming 100 MW counts as "one" data center, just as a small enterprise server room does. Therefore, the analysis must correlate facility counts with energy consumption
US has >>10x the facility count, reflecting a mature, decentralized commercial market. China's count excludes massive state-owned telco clouds. Energy for the Data Centers also matter
AI Compute Market Share (2025) US~75% of global GPU cluster performance, China ~15% of global GPU cluster performance
US dominance is driven by unrestricted access to Nvidia/AMD silicon. China's share is constrained by export controls but highly concentrated.
Have those placing Data Centers looked at underground aggregate mines? Most are in Limestone Strata in relatively stable terrain. Some of these sites cover hundreds of acres with ceiling heights of 25 Feet or more. The Temperature remains constant usually about 60 Degrees F. Many are located near or in metro areas. They usually have infrastructure and road networks in place. There is already extensive use of them for document storage and other warehousing functions.
Mmmh, this is what arrived here: “WatsA⎯p‡1 585⟢623➳O133.” - just letting you know, it may not have gone through correctly - unless that is some sort of code that I don’t know :). Festive greetings to you, too! :)
And power plants beaming solar to Earth at the same time too. Grok explained each starship launch (going weekly by next year’s end) could put a 30mw plant in orbit per week. That’s over 1562 mw per year beam-able to anywhere on the surface with a microwave receiver. Singularity here, power needs solved.
Thank you, Peter, for this heartening news about the orbital data centers. Granted that Solar energy will FINALLY be given its proper respect, only to be devoured by the data centers and not transferred to earthly needs.
It will at least lighten the load on electricity, but still leaves the door open for fossil fuel consumption, keeping the oil giants in business - and continuing environmental degradation.
There will always be the avaricious profit motive in human beings, but then it will be a spreading more evenly of these obscene profits - insuring a balance with nature and the well being of the middle classes and the poor.
I hope it leads to a future of potentially unlimited energy.
I hope this energy is made available to all.
I hope there isn't some premium price tag.
I hope that all leaders see this as a real opportunity to become altruistic.
I hope... For humanity, because we need win for all of us.
There's too much ugliness in this world and maybe we need an answer outside (literally) of it. Hope is one of our defining characteristics. It separates us from many other things in this world. Let's hope.
Time will tell, but I remain fervently optimistic we’ll be able to reach abundance for everyone. It may seem hard to reach now, but we’re getting there.
I work across the street from the new Indiana Amazon data center. I literally watched this place being built day by day. Unbelievable. The cornfield roads looked like the Dan Ryan. They must have bought every John Deere Gator made in 2025 just for the foreman to drive around the site. There were more equipment vehicles than you’d see at a Caterpillar plant. These guys had to have been given a blank check and told to get it done in a year. Impressive.
Amazing… The speed at which these sites are being built is unbelievable. Mustafa Suleyman from MSFT recently said their Fairwater data center in Atlanta has taken over 15 million labor hours…
On the same page with you Peter, recently added a post to my Substack Data Centres in Orbit… if you please. 🖖🏼✨
Of course orbiting solar-powered data centers can be done, technically. Easy. The problem is with the starry eyed calculations and the failure to calibrate those against Musk's past forecasting accuracy.
Orbiting data centers is merely the latest massive stock fraud peddled to and by futurists to prop up the SpaceX IPO's absurd valuation based on retail investor gullibility and exploiting the bigger fool theory that has so far foiled the Tesla stock shorters, but won't forever.
To put this in more grounded terms, terrestrial solutions for data center power are moving fast along the curve of scale, learning and innovation, and the space based tech has no chance of catching up on cost, even with a trillion dollar SpaceX IPO subsidy. This will go the way of the Boring company.
The earliest project of this type is ServerSky a 15 year old project to put chip sized thinsat server swarms in orbit. Keith Lofstrom http://server-sky.com/ServerSky
Bandwidth and altitude 300- 350 miles is crowded. So where?
Peter, knowing what you do now, having watched “The Age of Disclosure”, how safe is it for us to have so much data in orbit like that? Also, I sure would appreciate you share your thoughts on that documentary in a near-future Moonshots Podcast. Clearly this knowledge changes how we look to the future.
Thanks for the idea, I’ve been wanting to cover ‘Age of Disclosure’ for some time. Will keep it in mind!
the raw count of data centers can be misleading. A massive hyperscale facility consuming 100 MW counts as "one" data center, just as a small enterprise server room does. Therefore, the analysis must correlate facility counts with energy consumption
US has >>10x the facility count, reflecting a mature, decentralized commercial market. China's count excludes massive state-owned telco clouds. Energy for the Data Centers also matter
AI Compute Market Share (2025) US~75% of global GPU cluster performance, China ~15% of global GPU cluster performance
US dominance is driven by unrestricted access to Nvidia/AMD silicon. China's share is constrained by export controls but highly concentrated.
Have those placing Data Centers looked at underground aggregate mines? Most are in Limestone Strata in relatively stable terrain. Some of these sites cover hundreds of acres with ceiling heights of 25 Feet or more. The Temperature remains constant usually about 60 Degrees F. Many are located near or in metro areas. They usually have infrastructure and road networks in place. There is already extensive use of them for document storage and other warehousing functions.
Awesome, love it, thank you!! See, we can all win :)
Absolutely, thank you so much!
Thanks vm!🙏
Mmmh, this is what arrived here: “WatsA⎯p‡1 585⟢623➳O133.” - just letting you know, it may not have gone through correctly - unless that is some sort of code that I don’t know :). Festive greetings to you, too! :)
Brilliant and educational piece 👊🏼🙏🏼
Thank you!
And power plants beaming solar to Earth at the same time too. Grok explained each starship launch (going weekly by next year’s end) could put a 30mw plant in orbit per week. That’s over 1562 mw per year beam-able to anywhere on the surface with a microwave receiver. Singularity here, power needs solved.
Thank you, Peter, for this heartening news about the orbital data centers. Granted that Solar energy will FINALLY be given its proper respect, only to be devoured by the data centers and not transferred to earthly needs.
It will at least lighten the load on electricity, but still leaves the door open for fossil fuel consumption, keeping the oil giants in business - and continuing environmental degradation.
There will always be the avaricious profit motive in human beings, but then it will be a spreading more evenly of these obscene profits - insuring a balance with nature and the well being of the middle classes and the poor.
I hope...
I hope this works.
I hope it leads to a future of potentially unlimited energy.
I hope this energy is made available to all.
I hope there isn't some premium price tag.
I hope that all leaders see this as a real opportunity to become altruistic.
I hope... For humanity, because we need win for all of us.
There's too much ugliness in this world and maybe we need an answer outside (literally) of it. Hope is one of our defining characteristics. It separates us from many other things in this world. Let's hope.
Time will tell, but I remain fervently optimistic we’ll be able to reach abundance for everyone. It may seem hard to reach now, but we’re getting there.