Google global head of data center energy says space data centers could cost up to 100 times more than terrestrial ones
Amanda Peterson Corio’s remarks came weeks after Google launched its first Suncatcher prototype, a roughly 1kW satellite that has since run Gemma 4 on an orbiting TPU, one chip at a time
Corio says the real bottleneck on Earth is permitting rather than power, the same politics that backers of orbital compute claim they can escape
Google has spent the past month showing off AI chips working in orbit, but the executive responsible for powering its data centers back on Earth has just put a sobering price on the idea. Speaking at The Information’s recent WTF Summit in Napa Valley, Amanda Peterson Corio, Google’s global head of data center energy, said data centers in space could cost up to 100 times as much as those built on the ground. Her advice to the rest of the industry was simple and (pun intended) grounded: "Let’s explore all the terrestrial options before we go extraterrestrial." A very expensive proposition? The remarks land at an awkward moment, because Google is testing exactly this kind of hardware right now. Its first Project Suncatcher prototype, built with satellite operator Planet, launched on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission on October 1. Google recently also announced its Hello World milestone: an onboard Gemma 4 model, running on a TPU, wrote a short haiku about being in space, which was downlinked as the satellite passed over Svalbard, Norway. The company bills this as the first AI response from a data center-class TPU in orbit. That is a carefully measured claim, given that Starcloud put an Nvidia H100 into orbit a year ago and was running AI models on it within weeks. Scale is the bigger caveat and one that can be easily overlooked amidst the hype: The satellite carries four TPUs but generates only about 1kW of solar power, so it can run just one chip at a time for roughly 20 minutes per session, according to The Next Web . A single 1 GW AI campus, the kind now under construction on the ground, draws about a million times that much power. Google has described Suncatcher as a "moonshot" since it was unveiled a year ago, and project lead Travis Beals told NPR on launch day that he did not expect orbital compute to become cheaper than the terrestrial kind within the next five years. Not the first or last skeptic of orbital datacenters
This did start a somewhat interesting conversation on Wall Street; Short seller Jim Chanos read Corio’s statement as $5 trillion per gigawatt of compute, and posted on X that the gap between her view and the estimates of SpaceX management and bulls "should give pause to anyone trying to model this business out." TIKR pushed the arithmetic further by examining recent claims: SpaceX’s CFO told investors last month that new compute pays for itself in under a year at current rental rates. Built in orbit at up to 100 times the cost and rented at the same price, TIKR calculated that payback stretches to as long as a century, or about a decade even at a tenth of Corio’s stated ceiling. That matters because orbital compute underpins part of SpaceX’s roughly $1. 8 trillion market value at the time of writing…