Executives and U.S. government IT leaders discussed the promise and challenges of building data centers in space at the AI Infra Summit.

Orbital data centers are edging closer to reality, though significant technical and economic obstacles remain, according to industry and government leaders who discussed the future of computing in space at the AI Infra Summit held Sept. 15–17 in Santa Clara, Calif.

Sumeet Singh, chief data and AI officer at satellite communications company Viasat, identified thermal management, bandwidth limitations, and launch costs as primary hurdles. In the vacuum of space, heat can only be dissipated through radiators, which must be large enough to handle substantial thermal loads. “With size comes weight. Weight is a huge currency when you think about orbital data centers,” Singh said during a panel discussion on Thursday, Sept. 17. He also highlighted limited uplink and downlink capacity, alongside the steep cost of deploying systems into low Earth orbit (LEO). Today’s launch costs range from $2,500 to $3,000 per kilogram, but Singh noted they would need to fall to roughly $200 to $500 per kilogram for orbital data centers to make financial sense.

Joe Yaffe, COO and chief legal officer of Cowboy Space Corp., which is building and aiming to launch orbital data centers, agreed these obstacles are real. He added that reliance on a single dominant satellite launch provider has become a bottleneck in its own right. To address this, Cowboy Space is developing its own launch vehicle and plans to use the rocket’s second stage as the data center itself. On the bandwidth front, Yaffe emphasized optical connectivity: “We’re believers that data transmission needs to take place optically, uplink and downlink, in order to move what will be increasingly larger amounts of data,” he said. Power constraints are also being addressed by Star Catcher, an in-space energy utility. Chief marketing officer Camille Bergin said her company is developing laser-based power beaming to augment existing solar arrays, potentially delivering up to 10 times more power to orbiting systems.

From a customer standpoint, however, adoption remains cautious. Deepak Sachdeva, CIO of the U.S. Air Force, stated that the military is not yet ready to adopt orbital compute at scale. His priorities—operational effectiveness, real-time or near-real-time latency, resilience, and security—are measures by which he said current technology still falls short. “From a consumer-to-consumer level, I think it’s ready. But from an operational need, which is global in its nature, I think there is still some work to be done,” he said. “The best approach, in my view, is to do some sort of proof of concept.”

Singh, whose company seeks to participate in the emerging orbital data center ecosystem, stressed that the industry must prove itself incrementally, both technically and commercially. He pointed to StarCloud’s November 2025 launch of a satellite featuring an Nvidia H100 GPU as a promising sign, while cautioning that a single-GPU demonstration is far from megawatt- or gigawatt-class infrastructure. “We suddenly talk about megawatt- and gigawatt-class data centers. I think we need intermediate proof points … something in between where you have 100- to 500-kW-class compute,” he said. Additional milestones, Singh added, include securing sufficient launch capacity and demonstrating that customers will actually purchase compute in space.

Bergin echoed the need for a measured “crawl, walk, run” approach, noting how her company first validated its technology on Earth before pursuing space-based demonstrations. “There are a lot of people in this industry who have a tendency to just say, ‘This is the thing that we’re going to build, and it’ll just happen,’” she said. “I think from the orbital compute perspective, what are those incremental steps? How do we get from operating at 5% to 10% on a single H100 as a prototype to a megawatt-class, gigawatt-class data center? … We can’t just design something in space because we think it’s cool and it’s the next frontier. There has to be a real need and a real business model.” She also argued that orbital facilities could mitigate local opposition to ground-based infrastructure. “All of us are super-familiar with the fact that people don’t like these data centers. They don’t want them in their communities. They are super-problematic. … So space [is] offering a solution if we can get there.”

Despite the lingering challenges, Singh remains confident in the sector’s trajectory. “This isn’t a question of if it would happen. I think this is more of a question of the step function. When would this happen?” he said.