Falling launch costs and rising launch cadence have turned a once-fanciful idea into a live commercial proposal: data centers in orbit. Several companies have floated space-based facilities that would run AI workloads using space’s free solar power and radiative cooling, without the land-use fights that increasingly slow terrestrial data center construction. These proposals may or may not reach orbit on their backers’ timelines, but they are the most concrete example of a broader shift already underway, one that also sits behind proposed moonbases, asteroid and lunar mining ventures and travel to more distant destinations: the exploitation of space is upon us.
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