Local opinion: For new data center locations, just look up

The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:

With the controversies surrounding Project Blue continuing to swirl, it's important to note that communities around the country have similar concerns. From Virginia to Ohio to South Dakota, there are plans for thousands of new data centers to feed the insatiable appetite for AI.

Most of the challenges fall into four buckets:

1) Power. Each new data center will consume tens to hundreds of megawatts of electricity. Some will build their own generating plants, while some will tap the local utility grid. Either way, they'll be competing for power with residential and commercial use and potentially driving up individual electric bills. New gas-turbine power plants are back-ordered for years, and new nuclear facilities are coming online, but slowly.

2) Water. The original plan for Project Blue was based on water cooling. Although some of the estimates for water usage were exaggerated, a water-cooled data center is comparable to connecting a new golf course or two into your city's plumbing. That's not a challenge in some places but, in the desert, we notice it. And, as Tucson has discovered, switching to air-cooling is more expensive and less efficient.

3) Neighbors. Once running, the tens of thousands of servers — with associated fans and power supplies — generate an audible "hum" which can be annoying to neighbors. Locating them at a distance from neighborhoods can help, but that might limit future residential growth.

4) Zoning/Permitting. This is the enormous hurdle facing all new data centers, especially now that citizens have been mobilized and realize their power in the permitting process. And the process doesn't scale. Building a thousand data centers requires a thousand unique permits, each managed through the relevant municipalities. The cost and delay of the required paperwork is enormous. And each city or county can impose unique requirements, eliminating economies of scale from replicated designs. 

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But there's a place where none of these four factors are an issue — about two hundred miles straight up.

In orbit, electric power from solar cells is essentially unlimited. And in certain orbits, you can avoid the Earth's shadow and rely on those solar cells 24/7, without huge battery backups.

Cooling is straightforward. Just radiate the excess heat out into the darkness of space, as we've done for decades on the International Space Station.

There's no noise in space. And no neighbors to complain, even if there were.

And there's no zoning and no land-based permitting process. You need a launch license from the FAA, and radio frequency license from the FCC. With those, you can launch hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands, of orbital data centers.

Data centers in space have been talked about for years, but the topic has really caught fire in the last month. Google, SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin have all begun openly discussing their plans and revealing systems under development. An Nvidia-backed startup (Starcloud) launched their first demonstration satellite last month. The demand for capital is so high that it may trigger a SpaceX IPO next year, which would make it the most valuable company on Earth.

With Amazon's exit from Project Blue, and its rumored replacement with Meta (Facebook), an enormous data center in southeast Tucson may or may not happen. But ground-based challenges will eventually slow the development of new data centers nationwide. The winners will be aerospace companies who commit to solving the engineering problems quickly for moving data centers to orbit ... and the consumers who enjoy cleaner, quieter, less disruptive computation behind their AI applications.