Technology, Connected - Why AI Data Centers Might Leave Earth

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

Philip Johnston is the CEO of Starcloud and launched an Nvidia H100 chip in space and gave a TED talk about it. As you do if you're responsible for building the infrastructure for space-based data centers. Elon Musk was not the first. He follows in the footsteps of Mr Johnston. And so, rather than Mr SpaceX, our first technology reaction video is this TED talk from San Francisco.   We watched it for the first time. Live. On TV. This is not theoretical. It's also not up to date. Philip filmed this in October 2025. Starcloud have already launched the Nvidia H100 on a Falcon 9 up into space. It's happening disruptors and curious minds. It's happening. Philip predicts most data centers will be in space within 10 years. We agree. Please enjoy the show.Cheers, Mark & Jeremy.--Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [e-mail]

Disruptors and Curious Minds, welcome to Thinking on Paper, the technology podcast for those who think. We're doing a reaction video. The plan is to go live for the Artemis launch, and we need to do some prep for that. So we've decided to choose Philip Johnson's TED Talk on Data Centers in Space from San Francisco from October of 2025. So are we, this could go one of two ways, friends and neighbors. this could be something really cooler, it could be a bad, bad version of Mystery Science Theater 3,000. So maybe somewhere.

It's not going to be bad. It's Philip Johnson in a leather jacket and white trainers on stage at TED talking about data centers in space. He looks good. He looks sharp. Yeah, he looks sharp. He does look sharp, doesn't he? He looks like he's been shopping at the same shop as Mr. Envidia.

Yeah, a little. He does, he is given a little jensen vibe. right here. I like the trainers. I like the trainers. All right. Let's, yeah, let me get this where it needs to be here. The beginning. The beginning. Do we need copyright, something for this? Are we allowed to do this? A Ted going to kick us off YouTube. Hey, I'd rather, yeah, let's ask for permission later, man. All right. Are you taking something out of the open AI playbook there, Jeremy? Oh, definitely not the open AI playbook. No, I don't want to be associated with that one.

All right, here we go. This time next week, I will be at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Base, nervously awaiting the launch of our first spacecraft. Much about that setting will be different from this one, but there are a few things that will remain the same. For example, like now, in a week's time, I will also be hoping not to crash and burn. Oh, come on.

So, oh, yeah, a little dad joke there. That's okay. That's okay, but... I like that. Can you imagine though, Mark, you're on stage, number one. You see the TED timer down there, 1439. You've practiced your stuff. You're ready to roll.

But you're also like, holy crap, I'm getting ready to like put something into space that has never been put into space before. And you have that kind of resting in the back of your mind too. That's a lot to think about. Yeah. And being on stage at TED, it's a big gig, isn't it? There's going to be some nerves. There's going to be some.

You've got to start with a joke, don't you? Yeah, 21 seconds in, we get a dad joke, so I love it. Good job, Philip. Off we go. Like now, in a week's time, I will again be wearing my same lucky underpants. That's not a joke. Two dad jokes. So what about the spacecraft next week makes it so special that it warrants a rare second

weekly appearance of said undergarment? It's because it will be the first time that anybody has tried to launch an AI data center to space. More specifically, we will be the first to launch the Embedia H100 to chip, H100 chip to space, which is about a hundred times more powerful GPU or AI compute than has ever been in space before. In fact, this spacecraft is the first step in a much larger vision to build almost all data centers in space. And today I will make the case for this idea. The idea that the abundant energy and cold temperatures in space will soon mean,

that it makes much more sense to build data centers in space than it does to build them on Earth. All right. Let's stop right there. So we are, the date today is February 5th, since October. Some pretty key individuals have been echoing the same sentiment that Philip has said back in October and also what was previously echoed by Gerardo O'Neill to a certain extent back in the 70s that we could make use of space. The ground swell for space-based data centers since October has been monumental,

and it's all down to two men, Philip Johnson and Elon Musk, who at October time he started tweeting about this, and sometimes tech Twitter feels like a game of who can impress Elon Musk the most. And as he posted about it, there's just this surge of, yes, we're going to put the data centers in space, data centers in space, Nvidia on board, as he said, the H-100 chip is up there. The one thing that I just keep pushing back on me is we're going to put all the data centers in space.

Have you seen what they're building on the ground? That's, yeah, it's one of those things. It's a mindset thing, right? We're in, we're in micro-test mode with this. We're in not minimum viable product, but we're in like minimum-viable product, but we're in, like, minimum viable test, right? And we're kind of proving this model. Do you think Philip would agree with that, what you just said?

Well, think about it. You can't put, you can't put like a megawatt of IT load into space right now that has two megawatts of power and cooling load to support the one megawatt of IT load, meaning the compute, it, you can't just. What can the H-100 do? What's this, the NVIDIA H-100? There's one. What are we looking at?

Do you know? Chip by chip. I'm not sure, but it's a very small processing load compared to like what the terrestrial data centers are doing today. All right, let's keep going. But first, why do we need more data centers? Well, there's both a carrot and a stick. As many of the speakers have mentioned, the carrot is the promise of AI.

So that's things like new treatments for cancer, self-driving cars, a super intelligent companion in everybody's pocket. in order to realize the promise of AI, we will need many more new data centers and many more new energy projects to power them. So that's the carrot. But there is also a stick which people don't like to talk about as frequently. And that is the very real risk in being left behind by competitor nations. This comes with very, very real national security implications for the U.S. I was not expecting that.

The politics of space. I was just thinking, what's he going to say? what's he going to say? What's he going to say? What's the stick? What's the stick? Yeah. And I wasn't expecting him to bring that up. So yeah, I like that. We've been speaking a lot about the politics of space. And of course, he's right. So we know we need more data centers. But why not just carry on building them on earth as we have been? Well, some forecast suggests that over the next just three years alone, we will need an additional 50 to 100 gigawatts or 50 to 100 new nuclear power stations in just the US alone.

Okay, sorry, I got to do it back to the future reference. 1.21 gigawatts. Yeah, all right. So, yeah, that's an ass load of power. Moving along. Is that the technical term, okay? It is, yep. Meet the coming demand for AI.

Permitting and other constraints mean that this is not possible. And this is basically leading to a dramatic rise in energy prices. And we also are sucking up rivers and reservoirs. was to keep these data centers cool. A few weeks ago, I was invited down to Tucson, Arizona, to meet with community leaders there. Tucson recently became the first city in the U.S. to unanimously vote to reject a new data center proposal, a gigawatt-scale data center proposal, in their community, primarily due to concerns about energy and water usage.

I spoke with many members of the community. They had been shocked to find out that this new data center proposal would have put a strain on energy and water in the community, that would have been a detriment for generations to come. All right. So pause on there. Good on Tuscan, Arizona. Yeah, for sure. We'll go just to call back to Empire of AI, Karen Howe.

We talked about, there was a whole chapter, I think, dedicated to the effects of these massive hyperscale data centers in these communities related to water, related to power grids and, and all of that stuff. So that's a real, that's a real thing. That's a real thing that's happening. and assault that needs to happen. But on the flip side, my mind is certain to think about, okay, so yeah, that's definitely something.

But then you also think about the impact and cost of launching things off the earth and, you know, the effects of that as well. Build them in space. Build them on the moon. You don't need to launch them. You're building them up there, don't you? You get the humanoid self-replicating robots to make the data. All we need is 12 metric tons, 12 metric tons.

All right, onward. And it's not just Tucson. This is happening in towns and cities across the US and across the world. Do you think? Now, if you've ever seen a day center, you... Pause. So, is there also a creeping backlash against AI in general? I mean, is there more, I don't know what happened in just on Arizona,

but is there, are the people starting to rise up and say no to AI and no to day centers, or is it just the, the, the, it's just the... I think this specific thing is more data center focused rather than AI focused. I mean, I think both are high impact news pieces, right? But I don't think it's getting as granular data centers specific to AI that are the challenge. I think it's data centers in general. Yep. You will know that they are massive.

So it can be pretty difficult to imagine what this kind of data center could look like in space. And so I would like to show you a short 15-second clip of what a huge 5-gigawatt data center in space might look like. Oh, cool. So here you see a starship-sized spacecraft, and I'll talk about this later, with a 100-ton module of chips connecting to a 5-gigawatt cluster

with a 4-kilometer solar panel with a 1-kilometer radiator. And don't worry, this won't block out the sun or anything. So jokes, but it's a big... bit of kit. Yeah, yeah, that's it. That's a good, good scale there. And like, where would this sit to?

He might be getting to this, but like we're talking about in our book club space to grow. We're talking about orbital debris and we're talking about lower earth orbit, geostational orbit. We're talking about the graveyard orbit that's above geo. Like, it's interesting to think about like where all this stuff lands in the context. But good to know the sun gets through it. I do know this looks a little bit wacky, by the way.

When we first released this video a year and a half ago, as part of our Y Combinator launch, we got roundly pilloried from all corners. No, not from us. We're proponents. And hey, dude, really cool game-changing ideas are going to get their asses kicked in the beginning, man. Like, you know, we always talk about the calcified systems,

want to perpetuate themselves, and, you know, the idea that, you know, something like this is going to get poo-pooed on by, people building stuff the normal way. Dude, hang in there, Philip. You're kicking ass, man. It's always a zero-sum game for so many people, isn't it? It's this or that.

You can't have this because this. And you can't have that because this is bad. And it's not like that. It shouldn't be like that. Agreed. Let's rewrite the book. Moving on. A few of the more polite ex-comments that we got a year and a half ago.

This got to be the dumbest shit. He just swore on Ted. Oh my gosh. I got to pause this right here and that's like we can we can maybe just look through these together. This is, this is amazing. And yeah, he just said shit on, on the TED stage. That's amazing. I wonder if he's the first.

This is ridiculously expensive and won't work due to connectivity issues, cooling issues, energy and mass. Okay, that's quite an educated troll. Ish. Even if it's wrong. Ish. So, so things move faster in a vacuum, right? So like the connectivity one is bullshit right there because. you know, the stuff can get back to Earth quicker than it goes through fiber optic cable.

So right off the bat, you know, the connectivity piece, the cooling issue is real. The cooling issue is difficult. It's a tough challenge to solve the energy. You got the sun right there, right? And if we're figuring out, you know, solar rays in space, right? Let's see, what else? Oh, yes, another space scam. So we see this in microcosm on our feeds all the time.

People just saying it's a scam. this sucks what a waste of money what a horrible idea where will the heat go stupidity on megawatt scale i quite like that stupidity on mega what scale they should they should they should put that as their tagline on their website you know just for a week and just see see what happens like it's so easy to to shit on new ideas man it's so easy to be a detractor and you know the trolls come together setting piles of money on fire and

parking lot. We're doing that already. Hey, author of that comment, we are doing that already with terrestrial data centers. Like, for real. Should we move on? Should we let him unpack this? All right, he probably does a better job than us. This got to be the dumbest shit I ever seen or heard. Fair enough. Fair enough. Each has their own opinion. I thought you nerds were supposed to be good at science. And just to be clear, I literally first got this message when I was inside a particle accelerated testing chips. Good luck trying to run an H-100 in space. To be honest, this is

actually very generous, so I really appreciate the good wishes. And my personal favorite, this will never get off the ground in a very literal sense. Dad joke reprised in the trolling comments. It's

true that revolutionary ideas often sound stupid at first, but sadly, it also happens to be true. Yeah, there you go. We just talked about that. 100%. At most terrible, like it is.

Also often sound stupid at first. So how can you be certain of which camp you're in and be sure that you're not in the second camp? Well, it's important to reason from first principles. But it is, I mean, to be very honest, in order to know which camp you're in, most oftentimes it is going to involve taking some risk. If you don't take some risk,

you're likely not doing anything consequential. So for us, to know definitively, if we can run an H-100 in space, the best way to do that is to build a spacecraft and launch it to space. And that's exactly what we're doing with our first spacecraft launching. Hell, yeah, dude. Like, that's like, all right. Yeah, because a lot of folks talk about doing really big things. Oh, we could do this and we could do that. And they're great storytellers and they're great fundraisers.

Yeah. So he's building some stuff and it's already up in space as we're sitting right now. H100 up in space, isn't it? They put it on the back of a Falcon 9, and it's up there. Good on you, man. Yeah. Next week. So, given how controversial and audacious this idea seems to be, I thought I would share a little bit of context about how this idea came about,

and then share some of the pros and some of the cons. A few years ago, I quite randomly, on a weekend, decided to take a trip down to Star Base, Texas, where SpaceX is building their new Starship rocket. This wasn't a work trip or anything. I'm just a huge space nerd, and this is my idea of a fun weekend. The first stop on the trip is to what they call the Rocket Garden, and it was the first time I had seen the massive new Starship launch vehicle that SpaceX is building.

This was impressive, but to be honest, what really impressed me, besides the Texas barbecue, which is amazing, what impressed me was that across the road from where I'm standing, behind the camera in this image, they are building or they were building then by far the largest factory I have ever seen they're building these two starship gigafactories that are essentially pretty similar to Tesla production lines in that they're designed such that within two years they will be rolling one starship per day off that production line this is interesting

whoa bro what we spoke to philip metzka last week didn't he what was he saying that the plan is to have one launching every two minutes or That would be how many you'd need to launch to keep up with the scale that they're predicting. I keep telling my kids, this is going to be like, this is going to be like new airport. The amount of flights that come out of Hartfield, Jags in airport or Heathrow, whatever, like, per day, this is going to be a very similar context. Yeah, I like that. Because while the launch cost with reusability might come down by 50 to 100 times,

the launch capacity, i.e., how many tons per year you can get to space, might go up by a thousand times or more. And how is that possible? It's because Starship is the first ever fully reusable rocket. So, for example, with the current launch vehicle, Falcon 9, if you build a new one every day for a year, at the end of the year, you still only have one Falcon 9 upper stage because it's expendable. Whereas with Starship, if you build a new one every day for a year, at the end of the year, you have 365 starships because they're reusable. And it's not just SpaceX.

There's new rockets coming from Blue Origins, Stoke Space, Relativity, space and rocket lab. Even if you have a pretty healthy dose of skepticism on their forecasts, the coming capacity is just mind-blowing and will be the real game changer. So this coming capacity reminded me or got me thinking about the concepts from sci-fi that I remember reading about as a kid or as a teenager under the torchlight at night. In the 1940s, Isaac Asimov first writes about the idea of space-based solar, which is where you have a huge, solar panel in space. I'm holding up the high-prositor.

Okay, let's, I'll make you a bet now. Is he going to say Gerald O'Neill or the high frontier in the next two minutes? Yes or no? No, no. He led with Asimov. He's going to stay there. Let's see, friends and neighbors. And then you somehow beam that power down. The problem with space-based solar, though, has always been that you lose most of the energy in transmission from space to Earth.

But with low-cost launch, we now have the ability to move things like data centers to space close to the energy source, to consume the energy there and just beam down the result, so we don't lose the energy in transmission. And we need six times less solar cells, since one square meter of solar panel in space produces six times the energy

of one square meter of solar panel on Earth. But there's a few additional costs in space. So I mentioned we're going to need six times less solar, but there's one big cost, which is we need the launch cost. the launch is to get the chips, solar panels, and radiators to space. But now you can see very clearly that there is clearly a breaking point where the launch cost is below the cost of permitted land, batteries, and six times the solar.

And we see that launch cost to be around $500 a kilo, as I mentioned, which is well within range of the Starship launch price. I'll finish with this. Earlier I mentioned the competition between nations for AI. Real quick, let's pause there. So that'd be a cool equilibrium to, kind of track mark as a metric when launch costs hit 500 that means we're at break even on what's happening terrestrially from a solar power perspective i think that's the important

differentiator right yeah and also his projected cost there we've heard a lot lower than that in space to grow we've read a lot lower than that i mean it's already down to that 14 15600 a kilo if i would expect it to be lower than that maybe 200 a kilo. In my expert opinion. There you go. He's just heads off as well. It's good.

Let's see where he lands. He lands this reusable rocket. We've seen rising tensions with the first hot war in Europe in generations. At its root, the biggest driver of large-scale war is competition for resources. And over the coming century, the biggest competition between nations will be for energy and water for data centers. some of you might know that in 1945 the United Nations Charter was first signed in this very room on this very stage where I'm standing right now huh does not know that didn't know that that's that's pretty cool look at the curtains in this image and the chandeliers they are the same same curtains that you will see

it happened in this room that is freaking rad dude and timely and yeah wow full circle things coming full circle. Look at all the lady hats in this image. So many lady hats. We were better dressed back then, weren't they? We gave more of a shit. Look at us. Look at us what we're doing, Jeremy.

We're never getting by there. We're both in hoodies. I'm literally wearing shorts and socks right now. Like, never used to go to the airport. You used to feel like you needed to dress up because it was like a big thing. We might take it for granted right now, but the United Nations has helped keep us safe since the Second World War until now. and as the grandchild of two British World War II veterans,

the words of the charter, the promise of their generation to ours, still move me every time I think of them. We, the people of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has wrought untold sorrow to mankind. The most effective way that we can save our own children and grandchildren

from the scourge of war will be to stop competing over the fundamentally finite resources of Earth and to start utilizing the near-limitless energy of our solar system and eventually of our galaxy. In a week's time, I'll be watching the first AI data center launch to space. In 10 years' time, most new data centers will be being built in space for the energy. And who knows, maybe in 50 years' time, if I keep wearing my lucky underpants. Nice call back.

We may have started work on a Dyson sphere to help harness the full power of our son. Thank you. Philip, dude, that was, I loved it. Quick little tie-in there at the very end. So in 10 years' time, he's predicting most data centers will be in space in 50 years' time. We've got the Dyson sphere happening. A couple of mic-drop predictions. What do you think about the UN tie-in at the very end?

I think that the geopolitics of all of this, the more we learn at thinking on paper, the more people we speak to, it will all come to a head, as things usually do, over human nature and human politics. Yeah. And Philip's right.

So if we can get the energy right before the real politics comes to a head, then that's perhaps the way to do it. Yeah. Well, this was, dude, this was fun. I think we do more reaction videos. Tell us what you think about this, guys. And, and Ted, hopefully you don't send us a cease and desist because we're just looking to elevate your content that was so brilliantly executed. Mark, final thoughts? Yeah, that was Philip Johnson speaking on the TED stage about data centers in space and StarCloud and their Nvidia H-100, which is now up there doing.

GPU things in space. That was our first reaction to video. There will be more. I like it. I felt like I was learning something then. It was nice to watch that first time live with you. So we'll be doing more of these. In the meantime, thinking on paper,

at XYZ, like and subscribe. Share this with a curious friend. Share this with a naysayer. Share this with somebody who says, stop building stuff in space. Stop talking about building stuff in space. We've got problems here on earth. Share them this.

Tell them to come to think on paper. And until next week, when we're back down the quantum rabbit hole, and we have grew, we're talking about hotels on the moon, we'll stay. No, until the next week, be disruptive, stay curious. Keep thinking on paper.