Kamal Ghorui
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has dismissed the idea of putting data centres in space as “ridiculous,” a remark that doesn’t just target his long-time rival Elon Musk—it also throws cold water on plans from Google, Jeff Bezos, and a growing list of startups racing to park GPUs in orbit.Speaking during a live interview in New Delhi on Friday, Altman said the economics simply don’t add up right now. “Do the very rough math of launch costs relative to the cost of power we can do on Earth,” he said, adding that fixing a broken GPU hundreds of miles above the planet is a problem nobody has solved. “Orbital data centres are not something that’s going to matter at scale this decade.”
Musk wants a million satellites; Altman says good luck repairing even one
Musk’s vision is the most ambitious of the lot. SpaceX has filed with the US Federal Communications Commission to launch up to one million satellites that would function as orbital data centres—each reportedly 31 miles long and operating over 310 miles above Earth. The pitch is straightforward: solar panels in orbit generate roughly eight times more power than on the ground, and you skip the years-long permitting delays that slow terrestrial builds.But Altman’s critique hits a nerve because the cooling problem alone is brutal. Space is a vacuum—great for insulation, terrible for shedding heat. The International Space Station needs a 10-tonne ammonia cooling system just to handle 70 kilowatts, roughly the thermal output of a single GPU rack. Scaling that to match a full-sized data centre would require radiator panels stretching over a square kilometre.
It’s not just Elon Musk—Google and Bezos are all in
Google’s Project Suncatcher aims to launch prototype satellites carrying its Trillium AI chips into orbit by early 2027. Bezos is reportedly co-leading a secretive venture called Project Prometheus focused on gigawatt-scale space data centres. Startups like Starcloud and Aetherflux are also in the race, and China has already put the first 12 satellites of a 2,800-unit computing constellation into orbit.
Altman isn’t saying never—just not now
To be fair, Altman left the door open. He acknowledged orbital data centres could “make sense someday.” But with launch costs still hovering around $1,000 per kilogram—five times higher than what Google’s own research says would make space compute economically viable—”someday” appears to be a long way off.
