(DCNF)—Data centers were once thought to be a driving force for economic growth. Now, Americans don’t want them in their backyards. Could space be a better fit?
Data centers started sprawling across most of the American South and the Midwest as politicians have embraced them to foster economic growth. However, as Americans have increasingly spurned the big tech warehouses, governors and lawmakers alike have pushed for moratoriums and more stringent rules against data center construction. That pushback is forcing some AI companies to look toward the stars.
But making that happen is no easy task, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation, as orbital data centers lack the power of land-based data centers and need to have its hardware protected against radiation.
“We are going to need more data centers in more places,” Kristian Stout, the director of innovation policy at the International Center for Law & Economics, told Daily Caller News Foundation.
Stout added that AI labs may face more pressure to explore orbital data centers due to Americans’ dislike of their presence in their communities.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, in August said that Nvidia, the world’s largest AI chipmaker, designed a “space-optimized” AI chip that will launch in orbit in the fourth quarter of 2027 “with more scale in 2028.”
“Our design is significantly simpler, lower cost, denser and lighter than a traditional rack,” Musk added. SpaceX said in August it would use Nvidia’s technology for orbital data centers.
SpaceX filed for approval with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch as many as one million satellites to do artificial intelligence, which now remains pending at the FCC, according to agency documents.
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Other companies have jumped onto the space bandwagon.
Space startup Cowboy Space filed for a 20,000 satellite constellation system it calls the “Stampede Data Center System,” according to FCC filings. Another startup, Starcloud, asked the FCC to approve to launch as many as 80,000 orbital data center satellites. Amazon’s Blue Origin hopes to set up a constellation of as many as 51,600 satellites. Space startup Orbital applied to deploy up to 100,000 data center satellites.
The FCC believes the Trump administration will facilitate a new age of American leadership in space.
“President [Donald] Trump is unleashing a new golden age of American innovation in space, and the FCC is helping to execute. Across the board, the Commission is moving quickly to ensure that the United States is the best place to launch, operate, and build the orbital infrastructure of tomorrow,” an FCC spokesperson told the DCNF.
In November 2025, Google announced Project Suncatcher, which would launch solar-powered satellite constellations into space. The tech giant plans to launch two prototype satellites in early 2027, it stated in a press release.
China, led by ADA Space and Zhejiang Lab, launched the first 12 of its 2,800 orbital satellite network in 2025, according to Space News. Many other Chinese firms such as China Mobile, Bailing Aerospace and Shanghai Xingshu Space Technology plan to launch their own orbital data centers, per Space News.
The European Space Policy Institute (ESPI) warned in August that Europe may fall behind China as it continues to plan how launch its orbital data centers.
“While European institutions continue to debate the future of computing in orbit, China is already building it,” the European think tank report stated.
How Would Orbital Data Centers Work?
Orbital data centers could offer flexibility, but they would likely pale in comparison to the average data center in terms of raw power, Benjamin Lee, a professor of electrical and systems engineer at the University of Pennsylvania, told the DCNF.
“The constraint is that right now it’s kind of the best proven case is like in the kilowatts, like low kilowatts of capacity, and we’re talking about putting up like 200 megawatt data centers on the ground. It’s very speculative right now is proven like it works, but it doesn’t work at the hyperscale level,” Stout remarked, arguing that orbital data centers would not match the raw power of data centers on Earth.
Lee argued that orbital data centers would focus on answering users’ questions via an AI chat bot instead of doing agentic work, which focuses on having the AI model do a job such as writing code or conducting work on behalf of the user.
However, orbital data centers would have other issues.
Companies would have to design orbital data centers to protect them from radiation from space.
“Cooling is actually complicated because in space you don’t radiate heat into the vacuum; there’s no medium. So, they need to have specialized radiators on these things in order to radiate away the heat,” Stout said.
“I know that Google has been collaborating with some companies. They’ve been bombarding a tensor processing unit with radiation and showing that even though radiation accumulates, the chip doesn’t fail,” Lee said.
Lee argued that orbital data centers need to have error-correcting software.
He added that radiation from space may change the code on the orbital data center, which raises questions about how the orbital data center would account for the radiation when running compute for artificial intelligence models.
“We need to actually check that that’s true, and I think that means launching things into space, running computations up there, and then seeing what happens,” Lee said.
Stout questioned if AI labs will have a plan to maintain and repair these orbital satellites. He said that most satellites last five to seven years and then often crash or burn up in the Earth’s orbit.
He asked rhetorically, “Do you take a billion dollars worth of GPUs [AI chips] and just burn them up in the atmosphere in seven years?” He noted that prior generation AI chips have a lot of value and flying the AI chips back to Earth would become very expensive.
Stout said that orbital data centers could help AI companies, but not at the scale of land-based data centers.
“Nobody has really proven that there’s a hyperscaler capability in the near term, so what you’re talking about is like edge computing or modifying existing satellite capabilities for better imaging,” he remarked.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
