While the United States and China push for advanced in-orbit cloud computing, Europe lags behind.
That’s the key claim in a new report from the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI), which grapples with the growing demand to relocate part of the global economy’s increasing demands for artificial intelligence (AI) energy consumption and processing power.
ESPI suggests about €70 million euros ($81 million) of private capital has moved into space-based data center initiatives in the past five years, including expenditure on components.
While start-ups are leaning heavily into what once seemed like an esoteric discussion, larger players are now taking an interest—including SpaceX’s Elon Musk. This matters, as deploying cloud computing literally above the clouds requires miles of solar arrays and giant radiators in orbit, in order to shed the gigawatts of heat generated by AI processing.
Amazon/Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos is also predicting that gigawatt-scale data centers will need to be deployed in space over the course of the next two decades.
In contrast, Europe risks becoming reliant on foreign orbital computing capacity unless the European Union takes swift action, according to ESPI. It’s key recommendations are that Brussels:
- Launches a European Space-Based Data Centre initiative as part of the 2028–2034 Horizon Europe Moonshot Projects.
- Uses the European Space Agency’s General Support Technology Programme (GSTP) and its Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) programme as public-private testbeds for maturing the enabling technologies.
- Establishes a phased roadmap that extends beyond R&D toward commercial orbital compute deployment.
Unfortunately, right now Brussels seems more preoccupied with regulation, at the expense of innovation.
