Data centers present sprawling engineering and political problems, with ravenous appetites for land and resources. Building them on Earth has proven problematic enough — so why is everyone suddenly talking about launching them into space?

Data centers are giant warehouses for computer chips that run continuously, with up to hundreds of thousands of processors packed closely together taking up a mammoth footprint: An Indiana data center complex run by Amazon, for example, takes up more real estate than seven football stadiums. To operate nonstop, they consume immense amounts of electricity, which in turn is converted to intense heat, requiring constant cooling with fans and pumped-in water.

Fueled by the ongoing boom in artificial intelligence, Big Tech is so desperate to power its data centers that Microsoft successfully convinced the Trump administration to restart operations at the benighted Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.

The data center surge has spawned a backlash, as communities grow skeptical about their environmental toll and ultimate utility of the machine learning systems they serve.

It’s in this climate that technologists, investors, and the world’s richest humans are now talking about bypassing Earth and its logistical hurdles by putting data centers in space. And if you take at face value the words of tech barons whose wealth in no small part relies on overstating what their companies may someday achieve, they’re not just novel but inevitable. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Jeff Bezos’s space launch firm Blue Origin has been working on an orbital data center project for over a year. Elon Musk, not known for accurate predictions, has publicly committed SpaceX to putting AI data centers in orbit. “There’s no doubt to me that a decade or so away we’ll be viewing it as a more normal way to build data centers,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently told Fox News.

The prospect of taking a trillion-dollar industry that is already experiencing a historic boom and literally shooting it toward the moon has understandably created a frenzy within a frenzy.

But large questions remain: Is it even possible? And if it is, why bother?

Orbital computing boosters claim the reason is simple: Data centers are very hot. Space, as sci-fi teaches us, is very cold. Data centers need a lot of energy, and the sun produces an effectively infinite supply of it. The thinking goes that with free ambient cooling and constant access to solar power (unlike terrestrial solar panels, these wouldn’t have to contend with Earth’s rotation or atmosphere), an orbital data center could beam its information back to our planet with few earthly downsides.

Experts who spoke to The Intercept say it’s nowhere near this simple. Despite the fact that putting small objects like satellites into orbit has become significantly cheaper than decades past, doing anything in space remains an extremely expensive and difficult enterprise compared to doing it on the ground. And even if the engineering problems are surmountable, some question the point.

There are varying visions of space data centers. Musk’s........

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