The European Commission Wants Your Data Centers in Space

Data center
Data center (Image credit: Shutterstock)

Environmental concerns have become increasingly entrenched in the collective consciousness - whether through climate activists' decisions on what pieces of art deserve to have soup thrown at them or through the participation (and notable absences) from the United Nations Climate Change Conference. In the meantime, and as spotted by The Register, the European Commission (EC) is exploring radical ideas for reducing the climate impact of data centers and other HPC (High-Performance Computing) deployments. Concepts include completely installing them outside the Earth's atmosphere, within the deep black of space.

The EC-led feasibility study ASCEND (short for Advanced Space Cloud for European Net zero emission and Data sovereignty) is part of the EU's "Horizon Europe" initiative and is bolstered by a €2 million budget. It also counts on several partners from the environmental, cloud computing, and space technology fields spearheaded by Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture between European aerospace and defense companies Thales and Leonardo. According to Thales Alenia Space, the primary motivator for the feasibility study doesn't pertain to performance, longevity, or energy efficiency. Instead, those elements have been wrapped within the bigger environmental picture of dealing with running emissions from operational data centers.

It's easy to see how space-borne data centers could be a boon for the environment. Due to them being outside Earth's atmosphere, emissions relating to their operation would no longer have an impact on our planet. It'd be impossible to reduce this value to zero (outside carbon compensation programs linked to new data centers) because most components would still have to be manufactured within our "pale blue dot" of a planet. But even as companies increase their hardware products' power efficiency generation after generation, the increasing performance requirements for the latest HPC hardware from any of the prominent hardware vendors have led to an ever-growing energetic (and environmental) footprint. That is precisely what ASCEND aims to tackle.

The idea, then, would be to build data centers that solar panels could entirely power: they already achieve higher efficiencies outside our atmosphere. They could provide power in the "hundreds of megawatts" range. These orbiting data centers would connect to Earth using optical links, which would do the heavy lifting in transmitting information from orbit. According to Thales Alenia Space, Europe has already mastered the underlying technologies that could make a feasible deployment scenario such as this.

Of course, the concern with atmospheric emissions doesn't disappear completely when we start putting data centers in space. CO2 emissions from the building and deploying spaceships that could carry the data center payload would add to the data centers' overall carbon footprint, possibly neutering any environmental advantages from being operated in space. And, of course, this also plays out with improvements in payload capacity from the latest (and future) rocket technology: one SpaceX Falcon Heavy could carry a much more significant payload in one go than multiple Falcon launches could ever aspire to.

ASCEND's first order of business, then, is to calculate whether or not it would make more sense to "yeet" data centers into space rather than build more of them on Earth's surface (or even, perhaps, in the deep seas as Microsoft successfully explored through its project Natick).

Materials from SpinLaunch

SpinLaunch wants to do away with environmentally costly rockets by spinning and flinging cargo into the stratosphere at speeds around 8,000 Km/h. (Image credit: SpinLaunch)

But even if ASCEND finds out that rocket launches would turn the environmental concerns on their head, there's always the option to... slingshot them? At least, that is the idea of SlingShot, a private company that's been tapped by NASA for trials of its launch system. SlingShot does away with fossil-fuel-heavy rockets and flings cargo out into space by attaching a payload onto one end of a giant spinning arm powered by electric motors. By making the spinning arm rotate at around 450 rotations per minute, datacenter-borne payloads could be shot into space at speeds reaching 8,000 Km/h. That's certainly one way of controlling carbon emissions.

Whether via rocket or other exotic propulsion means, ASCEND's second order of business is to understand whether data center payloads can be put to work after being carried by rocket and deployed into space - we have to remember that anything leaving our atmosphere faces immense pressures that could wreak havoc with anything but the most resilient hardware installations. And even if they can be put to work, there are many other concerns, such as maintenance, upkeep, the fast pace of obsolescence for data centers, and the ability to decommission these space-faring installations. We have enough "space junk" in Earth's orbit without several decommissioned data centers being added to that tally.

All in all, this is still an exploratory study and one that's likely to be revisited as technology progresses. Launch capability, cost, and efficiency have improved immensely since we first went "Ad Astra," The same is true of computing in general. So we'd say it's a question of time until ASCEND's solution (or another party's) fits the problem it's trying to solve - if not today, then in one of our tomorrows.

Francisco Pires
Freelance News Writer

Francisco Pires is a freelance news writer for Tom's Hardware with a soft side for quantum computing.

  • hotaru251
    solar winds, radiation, stray space junk, repairing a issue/damaged drive, etc etc.

    ideas got way too many issues that make it not viable currently.

    let alone if someone flat up destroys em during a war.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    hotaru251 said:
    ideas got way too many issues that make it not viable currently.
    And that's why they pay 2 millions for scientists to actually crunch all of that data and see how much not viable it is.
    Reply
  • jkflipflop98
    Wow. You guys really paid out over two million pounds to have some bloke say "Well that's not gunna work now, is it Guv?"

    Quick! Better levy a fine against another American technological powerhouse to pay the bills. I'm sure someone is guilty of something requiring a $1B+ fine.
    Reply
  • They just love to inflict pain and suffering onto themselves. Just like their war on fossil fuels will see that people get frozen this winter. Not the sharpest tool in the shed.

    very stupid idea for a very stupid reason. and a complete waste of money. This is what it’s like, letting bureaucrats run things. they run them into the ground from sheer stupidity.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    The stupid thing would be to believe that everything you do now is perfect and can't be improved upon...
    Datacanters need a lot of space which is very expensive to buy or rent on Earth and will only get rarer to find as things go on and they need a lot of electricity that is also getting pretty scarce, and very expensive, on Earth and especially in Europe.
    Sending them to low orbit space would solve both of these problems, viability is just a matter of how long it would take to break even.
    Europe doesn't have the luxury of vast amounts of useless space as other countries do.
    Reply
  • ikernelpro4
    hotaru251 said:
    solar winds, radiation, stray space junk, repairing a issue/damaged drive, etc etc.

    ideas got way too many issues that make it not viable currently.

    let alone if someone flat up destroys em during a war.
    TerryLaze said:
    And that's why they pay 2 millions for scientists to actually crunch all of that data and see how much not viable it is.

    With your type of thinking we would've never set foot on the moon, wouldn't have the ISS, wouldn't be planning to go to Mars et cetera.

    I don't even think you guys are europeans, so maybe leave this to us instead of inserting your american depressive self-doubting criticsm?

    2 Million Euros is a drop in the bucket. Datacenters in space is a great idea and will happen regardless what we think.

    If we can analyse on the issues and work on them then the entire space industry will profit from it.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    ikernelpro4 said:
    With your type of thinking we would've never set foot on the moon, wouldn't have the ISS, wouldn't be planning to go to Mars et cetera.

    I don't even think you guys are europeans, so maybe leave this to us instead of inserting your american depressive self-doubting criticsm?

    2 Million Euros is a drop in the bucket. Datacenters in space is a great idea and will happen regardless what we think.

    If we can analyse on the issues and work on them then the entire space industry will profit from it.
    As you can see I'm for this project, I was just saying that it makes sense for them to study how viable it is.
    Reply
  • jkflipflop98
    Datacenters in space is a moronic idea and it will never happen.

    "Hey guys, looks like we lost the power supply on nodes 231 and 232. Let's just send a technician to swap those . . . oh never mind"

    The smart thing to do would be to put them in the ocean. Launching them then consists of shoving them off the side of a barge.
    Reply
  • Yeah, something goes wrong and needs to be replaced and then it cost $1 billion to get up there to fix it. This is not going to happen ever as said above.

    let me just jump in my starship and go fix that. Yeah right to those saying it’s going to happen I laugh at you.

    This is not the same thing as going to the moon or even Mars. This is just plain stupidity and for a stupid reason on top of that.

    maybe once we make it to star trek technology, but until then you can forget it and it’s a complete waste of 2,000,000 pounds

    Europe would be much better investing in lots and lots of the newest nuclear technology to produce power so that they don’t have a huge power crisis and aren’t relying on other countries for oil or natural gas. There are many new reactor designs to choose from that are infinitely safer
    Reply
  • ikernelpro4
    Mandark said:
    Yeah, something goes wrong and needs to be replaced and then it cost $1 billion to get up there to fix it. This is not going to happen ever as said above.

    let me just jump in my starship and go fix that. Yeah right to those saying it’s going to happen I laugh at you.

    This is not the same thing as going to the moon or even Mars. This is just plain stupidity and for a stupid reason on top of that.

    maybe once we make it to star trek technology, but until then you can forget it and it’s a complete waste of 2,000,000 pounds

    Europe would be much better investing in lots and lots of the newest nuclear technology to produce power so that they don’t have a huge power crisis and aren’t relying on other countries for oil or natural gas. There are many new reactor designs to choose from that are infinitely safer
    jkflipflop98 said:
    Datacenters in space is a moronic idea and it will never happen.

    "Hey guys, looks like we lost the power supply on nodes 231 and 232. Let's just send a technician to swap those . . . oh never mind"

    The smart thing to do would be to put them in the ocean. Launching them then consists of shoving them off the side of a barge.
    Both of you missed the point. This is for the future and yes it's better since you don't have an atmosphere causing issue or natural catastrophies
    Reply