The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Why Space and Data Centers Don't Go Together || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

We've all seen the headlines lately talking about the proposed data centers across the U.S. While nobody wants these things in their backyard, putting them in space isn't going to solve our problems.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4fd7yuR

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That's C-A-R-I-L-H-A.com. Ceraloha. Sleeping Better starts here. Hey, everybody. Peter Zine here coming to you from Colorado. Today we are taking a question from the Patreon crowd. So it's a question that I have resisted answering because I don't like it. But so many people have asked, I figure what the hell. So it's on space-based data centers.

Is that the future? Will this solve some problems? How much is it? That's just a little bitty snake. Is this something we should take seriously? Let's explain what a data center is. You have dozens, hundreds, thousands of racks that contain modules that are packed with things like graphics processing units, DRAM and RAND memory, and then threading through it all some sort of coolant system. You see, most data centers are based on crunching data, the GPU part, and that generates a lot of heat.

So you incorporate the cooling system into the modules. and if you can into the chips themselves. I thought that's really cutting edge and no one's really doing that at scale just yet soon, hopefully. Anyway, those racks have weight. The GPUs have weight. NAND has weight.

The dram has weight. You need a lot of electricity. You need a lot of cooling. You need a liquid system. You need a pumping system. And if you're going to take a one gigawatt system and move it into space, the theory is that because space is cold,

cooling is cheap, and because solar power in space, generates at least five times what it does on the surface, power is cheap. No, no. Let's start with getting this stuff up there. So just the computational stuff, the racks and the things in them, not counting the cooling system, that's for something of the size, roughly 20 million pounds of weight. Then you need another 10 million pounds of weight for the liquid coolant.

Then you need another 5 to 8 million pounds of weight for all of the assorted things that keep it alive, the pump. the power cables and such. Okay. That by itself is about 250 Starship launches. Starship is the vessel that Elon Musk and SpaceX hope is going to revolutionize space travel. It's currently in the prototype stage. It has not been going particularly great.

But let's just hand wave that away and say that it works. 250 of those to get the equipment up. You're not done. Now you need a construction facility in orbit, which means you need a habitat in orbit. You also need a habitat at the data center, because a typical data, Center has 100 people working it at any given time. Now, the ISS International Space Station has never had more than 13 people at a time, and really it's only rated for 7. So you're talking about the equivalent of 20 to 40 ISS equivalents attached to this data center in order to carry out the work,

and that assumes that the work is possible, which it probably isn't. GPUs, really all the high-end chips are not rated for vibration, for cold, for heat, for humidity, and certainly not for radiation. And you're in space. So you don't have the planet's magnetic field and atmosphere protecting you. So now you need to clad the whole thing in radiation proofing, which is at least another 20 million pounds. There's another 200 starship trips. Also, a data center is a living thing. Chips burn out. You have to remove them and replace them. So now you need a space-based launch system just to maintain your one data center. Oh, and the biggest thing, heat. Yes, space is cold, but what people forget is that space is a vacuum and a vacuum is the most effective insulator we have ever discovered. So yes, you can

use radiator fins, but their area of effect has to be an order of magnitude bigger than what they would be on Earth and a very different configuration because they need to extend significant distance. You're talking about literally tens, if not hundreds of kilometers, square kilometer, of radiator surface in order to radiate the heat. Yeah, it's cold out there, but it's also insulative. So you're now talking about a system that needs a pumping system to get the liquid out to the radiator fins, and you are in zero-g.

So you don't only need more pumps to cover more territory. Pumps don't work as well in space because you don't have gravity doing some of the work. So now we're basically conservatively up to 500 space, a star, 500 star, what's it called? Starship, yeah, 500 starship launches. And a note on the radiators, this sort of design we don't build on Earth because, you know, we've got gravity. So not only are you talking about having to admit a fundamentally new system here for the cooling system, but just the cost of the radiators alone is probably about the same as the GDP of New Zealand, about $250 billion. And that is by itself 20 times the cost of a one gigawatt facility all

in on Earth. There's so many levels of dumb to this that I forgot one that's really kind of critical. The radiators, not only are they big and expensive, but remember space is an insulator. So if your radiator fins are flat on to sunlight, they'll actually absorb heat rather than get rid of heat. So you have to make sure they're always point in to the sun, which means that your space-based data center has to do something that no early based data center has to do. It has to be able to move. So you got to put engines and maneuvering thrusters on this thing complete with the fuel. So yeah, so much dumb. So anyone who tells you that data centers in space are coming because we don't have room is lying to you. Anyone who's telling

you it's the only way that AI is going to work is lying to you. And anyone who's trying to raise funds off of a story like this is just thinks you're stupid and it's going to get your money. Don't fall for it. Does this mean there can't be computing in space? Of course not. You can have small, small emphasis on small, like A-RAC systems attached to some sort of orbital platform. But all of these rules apply. Massive radiator fins, atypical cooling system. Huge cost to install. And unless you're going to permanently station people up there, when something fails, it's broken for good. So, no, this is not revolutionary. But if the rules of physics change, I reserve the right to change my mind.