Source: Orbital Computing — structural analysis of on-orbit AI infrastructure
This is the paper I recommended to the most people this semester, mostly because the reaction is always “that sounds insane” followed by “oh, actually that makes sense.” The physics argument for orbital computing is surprisingly compelling.
Terrestrial hyperscale data centres face three hard physical ceilings. Thermal: modern GPUs generate so much heat that cooling costs are approaching compute costs. Water: liquid cooling systems consume 1–2 litres of fresh water per kWh — a 100MW facility uses millions of litres daily. Energy: hyperscale facilities are approaching 1 GW of continuous power draw, and the grid infrastructure to support continued scaling is increasingly constrained.
Space offers what the paper calls the “three gifts of the void.” First, solar efficiency: 8–10× more irradiance than on Earth’s surface — no atmosphere, no night cycle, no clouds. Second, radiant cooling: ambient temperature in space is 3 Kelvin (-270°C). Waste heat radiates directly into deep space. Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) approaches 1.0. Third, vacuum communication: inter-satellite laser links operate at the speed of light through vacuum, with lower latency than fibre over equivalent distances.
The paper analyses on-orbit edge and orbital cloud architectures. Both are technically feasible given current launch costs and satellite miniaturisation trends. The timeline is uncertain, but the physics argument doesn’t depend on speculative technology.