Editor's note: This is the first of three feature articles Ars is publishing to explore the financial, technical, and competitive dimensions of orbital data centers. Although the idea of putting data ...

Data centers are emerging as a new environmental flashpoint for the tech industry. Public concern is growing over their hunger for power and thirst for water. What’s the tech industry’s reaction to ...

Elon Musk vowed this week to upend another industry just as he did with cars and rockets — and once again he's taking on long odds. The world's richest man said he wants to put as many as a million ...

The merger of xAI and SpaceX, the efforts by some startups, and research by Google have raised the question of when there will be data centers in space. The big advantage of space is the plentiful ...

Focus on grand ideas is fine, but there’s a long way to get these ideas into orbit - even with Jeff or Elon’s resources You may have noticed a flurry of articles in the last few weeks which all ran ...

In 2011, I published an article in the Boston University Journal of Science & Technology Law examining space-based solar power (SBSP) and the issue of property rights in space, and more specifically, ...

With rising costs of data centers and the ongoing need for more space, power, and technology to deploy these enormous AI factories, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in 2025 that AI computers in outer space ...

Starcloud has now raised a total of $200 million, and launched its first satellite with an Nvidia H100 GPU in November 2025.