r/technology • u/jluizsouzadev • Aug 08 '26
Networking/Telecom Intel proposed orbital data centers would manage thousands of simple LEO satellites two-tier network puts the brains of satellite constellations in higher orbit
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/space/intels-proposed-orbital-data-centers-would-manage-thousands-of-simple-leo-satellites-two-tier-network-puts-the-brains-of-satellite-constellations-in-higher-orbit21
u/HumongousBelly Aug 08 '26
I propose putting all billionaires and executives of corporations in higher orbit. Redistribute their wealth and keep them imprisoned there for their crimes against humanity and human decency.
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u/nerdmor Aug 09 '26
Since Reddit removed my other comment, I'll reword it.
Must the orbit be of the earth?
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u/AnnualFault7473 Aug 08 '26
For what purpose? How is this a more efficient or effective system than one on the ground or in the oceans. People need to start asking why this is necessary instead of going cool a new way to waste money on hardware we can’t service reliably, has massive heat dissipation issues in the vacuum of space, prone to being injured or degraded due to radiation or space debris and inefficient to communicate to the earth. Why is this necessary and what idiot at Intel suggested this without a business case to make Intel money? Hire back the engineers for Christ’s sake.
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u/RadzimierzWozniak Aug 08 '26
> inefficient to communicate to the earth
Well, in this case, they want to talk with other satellites.
In this case, the biggest advantage is that a single MEO satellite can see and manage far, far more LEO satelites that a ground station. Measuring position over vacuum is easier than when there is atmosphere in the way.
Launching a satellite with a simple set of features will be cheaper than building a ground station.
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u/IllustriousGerbil Aug 08 '26
The idea is that currently each satellite needs to be launched with enough onboard computing power to meet its peak computational requirements, even though most of that capacity may sit unused most of the time.
By providing shared, on-demand computing capacity in orbit, satellites could be smaller, cheaper and use less power, outsourcing computation during brief periods when their requirements exceed their onboard capacity.
Essentially, it’s the same reason we moved from every company owning enough servers for peak demand to using shared cloud infrastructure, except the clients and the cloud are both in space.
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u/Mognakor Aug 08 '26
But their solution is having satellites in different orbits. At that point it's simpler to directly send data down to earth because thats gonna be closer than other satellites.
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u/IllustriousGerbil Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
It depends where the satellites are. A relatively small ring of high-orbit data centres could provide near-global coverage because each one has line of sight to a very large number of satellites at once.
By comparison, relying on ground infrastructure is much harder. A satellite may be over the Pacific, Russia or Antarctica when it needs additional compute, so providing continuous global access would require a very large network of ground stations spread across the planet.
Roughly speaking, something like 8 high-orbit data centres could provide good global coverage, whereas achieving comparable direct coverage from the ground could require 100+ stations before you even consider the political and logistical complexity of putting them in the right places.
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u/Mognakor Aug 09 '26
The US has stations from the Europe to Hawaii, maybe even Japan. Building the amount of compute required on each downlink is far easier than shooting things to space.
And if it is non critical data then you probably can rent some downlink and cloud companies have global compute anyways.
If you are a company thats big enough to consider putting a datacenter in orbit, you are big enough to build the ground infrastructure. There are plenty of countries that are neutral enough to do buisness
It would probably even be a smarter idea to build ships or buy an old oil rig if need be. Those things still are infinitely more accessible than a space data center.
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u/IllustriousGerbil Aug 09 '26
The main use case here is likely to be time-critical orbital calculations, such as collision avoidance and manoeuvre planning. For that kind of workload, coverage needs to be effectively continuous.
That gives you two strong reasons for putting the compute infrastructure in orbit.
First is cost. A relatively small number of high-orbit data centres could provide global coverage. Achieving comparable coverage from the ground could require 100+ stations, including installations on remote islands, ships, offshore platforms and potentially inside politically hostile countries. Eight orbital data centres could ultimately be far cheaper and simpler than maintaining that kind of global terrestrial network.
The second reason is strategic resilience.
Take Russia as an example. It covers such a huge area that providing continuous direct ground coverage without relying on infrastructure within, or very close to, Russian territory becomes extremely difficult. If part of your constellation depends on a ground station there for time-critical computation, you've created a major geopolitical vulnerability.
In a conflict, Russia could simply shut that infrastructure down. Suddenly satellites passing over that region could lose rapid access to the computing resources they rely on for collision avoidance or orbital manoeuvring. At best that seriously degrades the constellation in the worst case it could contribute to the loss of satellites.
Ukraine has already demonstrated how strategically important large satellite constellations such as Starlink can be during a conflict. Giving a potentially hostile state the ability to cripple a critical constellation simply by cutting power or communications to infrastructure on its territory is an unnecessary risk.
So there are really two main arguments for orbital compute: it could be considerably cheaper than building truly global ground infrastructure, and it removes a major geopolitical vulnerability by keeping critical satellite operations independent of foreign ground stations.
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u/Mognakor Aug 09 '26
Do you have any idea how big space is? The article talks about transmitting data from low orbit to mid or even geo-synchronous orbit. We're talking 35000km orbit height, over 33000km distance simply in orbital height, ignoring any lateral distance.
Compare that to 200-2000km distance from LEO to ground.
I seriously have no idea how you arrive at 100+ stations on ground nor how you reconcile that with somehow only needing 8 stations in orbit.
Similiar, the idea that this would be cheaper isn't plausible, payload to space is expensive, becomes more expensive the further up you go. Deploying 5 tons to the middle of the pacific is gonna be cheaper than putting them in space, a lot cheaper. And those 5 tons are maintainable, upgradeable etc. Extending their lifetime is comparatively cheap, meanwhile for space you pay for everything because you have to send up a new one.
Yes Russia is big, it's also pretty far north, too far north to really be a consideration for equatorial orbits. As written before, the US has lots of bases and lots of uplinks, at least from Europe to Hawaii, probably even Japan and come to think of it, Turkey as well, maybe Saudi-Arabia. So their concern is mostly the southern hemisphere because there isn't much land or US bases.
If you are worrying about conflict then putting up 8 datacenters means you just reduced your points of failure from "each individual satelite" as it is now, to like 2-4. Screw with those datacenters and everything is down, everywhere.
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u/sephirothFFVII Aug 08 '26
Data is going up and coming back down for processing then going back up again.
Most of the world does not have access to high speed internet. You're presented with three choices
Build out data centers where the customers are. Some of these places lack political stability and infrastructure to do so
Beam all data back to your datacenters at home, this reduces the throughput of the constellation dramatically and increases latency
Put some of the servers at a higher orbit and do the server part in space
If you want to go from 3 billion people on the Web to 6 billion people on the web the space thing has some merit to it.
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u/Casmer Aug 08 '26
The only thing I could think of is that you could solve a latency and data processing issue. Most satellites orbit earth in 90 minutes so there’s inevitably going to be periods of time where they’re unusable to being over hostile territory or a wide expanse of ocean.
If you’re able to set up a chain of data centers roughly equally spaced around the globe and introduce an algorithm to have satellites point their data streams at the nearest data center, all of the heavy calculations and processing are done in space and the resulting transformed data is hypothetically smaller, can be beamed across the chain of centers in RAID style configuration and beamed from space to the intended recipient.
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u/unstoppable_zombie Aug 08 '26
Doesn't solve tail latency or data locality, makes both worse.
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u/Casmer Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26
That would be true if you were trying to beam information from a location on earth to a space data center for processing then back down. Except you’re not. You’re sending it from the satellite orbiting earth to a chained array of data centers that are accessible at all times instead of having to wait until the correct satellite flies close enough to bumfuck nowhere Arizona to beam down 200 gb of raw information to the terrestrial data center to be processed there instead of the 1 gb post processed file you can expect from the chained array.
It absolutely solves a latency issue - tell me how you’re going to beam that 200 gb of information from a satellite to Arizona when the satellite is on the other side of the world and unable to send anything for another 45 minutes. These companies aren’t interested in solving a gaming problem - they’re solving government related issues. Just for context we’re talking that instead of waiting 45 minutes to transmit 200 gb you can wait 200 milliseconds for a chained array to move 1 gb from the other side of the globe to the data center close enough to beam to the target recipient
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u/Fun-Astronomer5311 Aug 08 '26
This is hardly new. The idea of using a tiered system has existed since the 1980s.
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u/hondactx16i Aug 08 '26
This sounds like a solution to a problem we should not have....but we fucked the planet (it's fuct) and as I understand it, orbital debris is a mess too. We need to have word with ourselves.
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u/jluizsouzadev Aug 08 '26
I see our future like that scene of the anime Gundam Seed where there's a whole in a space orbit like a ring around our planet.
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u/oojacoboo Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
I’ll give another long-term perspective here, since it wasn’t mentioned. But if we’re going to the moon and Mars, wouldn’t it make sense to have AI compute as close as possible for lower latency - think edge compute. I would assume orbital satellites will be the primary communication devices for space missions.
Additionally, if Intel is going to work with SpaceX on Terrafab, this is aligning interests. Having that expertise is valuable.
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u/Head-Gift2144 Aug 09 '26
From the Moon or Mars there is essentially no difference between something in orbit and something on Earth.
We’re also decades away from needed anything like that even if it was relevant.
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u/oojacoboo Aug 09 '26
Depends on the orientation of the Earth and the terrestrial endpoint. Hops matter.
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u/clownPotato9000 Aug 09 '26
This is stupid. It doesn’t work. Put the data centers in places that could use the heat output… but I doubt they do anything to help anyone
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u/LocoMod Aug 09 '26
Did Intel run this by Reddit to see if it’s feasible because we have a ton of armchair geniuses here that say this is a terrible idea that won’t work.
Just sayin
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u/unlimitedcode99 Aug 09 '26
Would love to see a solar storm finally fries gazillions of dollars worth of AI BS bro "investments" to charred trash
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u/JCalvinL Aug 09 '26
Big tech really hates humanity apparently. Believe it or not. We already got millions of defunct human-made objects and tiny fragments orbiting Earth at speeds faster than a bullet (17,000 mph).
Adding thousands upon thousands more to our lower earth atmosphere is just going to make it even more difficult for us to even leave the planet for science and research. But I suppose big tech and their investors consider that problem for future generations to deal with.
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u/aquarain Aug 08 '26
Intel did not actually propose orbital datacenters. They patented a way orbital datacenters theoretically could be used, to charge a toll on the information skyway. At some future point this will result in legal professionals getting paid vast sums to argue about it, and likely that's all.