Data Centers

With SpaceX freshly public and its stock up 28% over the IPO price, talk of putting AI data centers in orbit is back in the headlines. The Fusion Report looks past the one obvious upside, nearly unlimited solar power in a sun-synchronous orbit, and tallies the costs that doom the idea: $160M to $280M per megawatt just to launch, two-year hardware refresh cycles, dense low-earth-orbit debris, space weather, and the near-impossibility of radiating away server heat in a vacuum. Against a ship-borne data center that fits in a shipping container and cools itself for a fraction of the price, orbital compute simply doesn’t pencil out. The verdict: outside of analyzing data that originates in space, orbital data centers are not a great idea.

The global data center market reached $319.5 billion in 2024 and is on track to nearly triple to $988 billion by 2035, with electricity consumption projected to double by mid-decade. Natural gas currently leads as the near-term power source of choice, but nuclear fission, battery storage paired with solid-state transformers, and fusion energy are all competing for a role in the long-term supply picture. This analysis examines where each technology stands today, the tradeoffs operators face between speed-to-deploy and decarbonization, and why data center investors are already placing bets on fusion despite its longer timeline to commercial scale.