• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, 5 hours ago

Government and political backlash related to building data centers to support a growing need for energy and processing power to run AI has been accelerating rapidly into an intense, bipartisan populist movement.

No one wants these gigantic buildings in their community for a variety of reasons, including required water and energy consumption on Earth. But to keep driving advertising into the future, brands and agencies will need computing power to process new types of agentic and automated futuristic systems.

Advertising data could be processed in space. In the short time in-orbit data centers will not reshape advertising overnight, but in time they become practical by boosting and managing heavy AI workloads behind targeting, creative generation and campaign optimization.

They also could potentially reach global marketers that are more difficult to serve today. As an indirect effect, if AI agents begin to help people choose or buy products, advertisers may lean more on proving value to algorithms than persuading humans with synthetic ads.

Network latency will become less of a problem than data-transfer latency and connectivity.

In the early years, moving enormous amounts of advertising, consumer, and video data between Earth and its orbit could become a challenge.

Google has an orbital data center project called "Suncatcher," which it revealed earlier this year.

If orbital data centers become economically feasible, Elon Musk's "Starmind" could gain the advantage.

Musk first confirmed Starmind -- the name of SpaceX's orbital AI constellation -- in June following an online trademark leak. In July, he posted on X about it. There have since been technical details released about the company's partnership with Nivdia, Google, and others.

Then on Tuesday, Musk announced that SpaceX will build the largest launch site yet, in Louisiana. Construction of the $100 billion project named Starbase is scheduled to start next year on a 125,000-acre site.

The site will support thousands of Starship flights annually with missions launching to Earth's orbit, Moon, Mars and beyond, SpaceX said on Tuesday. 

While the facility will support a variety of missions, its primary industrial purpose is to provide the launch capacity needed to lift the massive Starmind AI satellite constellation into orbit to act as data and processing centers.

Unlike traditional satellites, Starlink primarily acts as a router to pass internet signals between Earth and the user, while Starmind satellites are built as the compute layer.

The Starmind satellites will host, process, and execute AI workloads without needing a ground-based server. The systems will use less electricity because power will come from solar. 

SpaceX said it aims to launch its first Starship flight from the new Louisiana base in 2029.

Moving data centers into orbit directly addresses one of tech's biggest energy problems and bottlenecks on Earth. Things like local community and political backlash over requiring resource-heavy infrastructures.

SpaceX's latest IPO filings reveal that Starmind will operate as a commercial cloud provider. The company has already struck official deals to sell its orbital computing power to Google and Anthropic, transforming the constellation into a multi-tenant space cloud, according to Marketwatch.

For now, reports MorningStar, the benefits of space-based data centers are that companies can avoid regulatory red tape and community backlash. Critics say that Earth-based data centers will still be far cheaper to run for several years or more.

MorningStar cited Wood Mackenzie, a research firm, that estimates a one-gigawatt orbital data center would cost $170 billion, more than triple the cost of a traditional data center. Costs are expected to decline in time as rocket launches also become cheaper, something SpaceX is working on with its Starship vehicle.