Why now
Why orbital computing is being discussed now. The pressure AI compute demand places on terrestrial infrastructure and the limits that make space relevant.
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The ideas to retain
1. The explosion in compute demand
Generative AI has been the most visible catalyst for accelerating compute demand, but it is not the only one. Training large models, inference at scale for hundreds of millions of users,…
2. Terrestrial bottlenecks
Building more data centers on Earth is not infinitely scalable. Six main problems slow the expansion of terrestrial infrastructure, and unlike analyses from five years ago, there are now…
Power grid
Large-scale data centers consume power at rates that local grids cannot always absorb. Google reported in January 2026 that grid-connection lead times had become its biggest operational…
