The race to build the future of AI may be shifting off the planet entirely. According to a new report, Blue Origin has been quietly developing technology for orbital AI data centers.

Blue Origin wants to put compute where the power is.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Blue Origin has spent more than a year working on the hardware and systems needed to run AI workloads in orbit. The logic is clear: terrestrial data centers are hitting real-world limits—electricity, water, cooling—and AI’s appetite isn’t slowing down.

Space, on the other hand, has none of those constraints. Continuous solar energy. No weather. No water-intensive cooling. A blank canvas for as much compute as you can launch.

Jeff Bezos said as much in October, arguing that gigawatt-scale orbital data centers could be viable within 10 to 20 years..

SpaceX has the same idea.

The same report says SpaceX plans to load AI computing payloads onto next-generation Starlink satellites.

If the world needs more compute, and Earth can’t provide it fast enough, companies will simply build it above the planet instead.

The interest in orbital computing is rising becuase today’s AI training clusters are consuming so much power and water that even hyperscalers are running out of places to build them.

Space-based facilities solve several pain points at once:

• Unlimited solar energy

• No weather-related downtime

• Drastically reduced land and cooling requirements

• Global coverage baked into the architecture

  
  

The question isn’t whether companies want to build in space—it’s whether they can get there fast enough to stay ahead of AI’s resource demands.

The simultaneous moves from Blue Origin and SpaceX suggest the next phase of the AI infrastructure race could be contested in orbit. The first companies to deploy meaningful compute capacity could gain a structural advantage in bandwidth, energy, and uptime.

It could also spell trouble for tech firms without in-house rocket programs. SpaceX and Blue Origin are owned by Musk and Bezos, respectively. So costs alone would put Tesla and Amazon at a huge advantage.

Space data centers are probably still years away from being operational. But it's where the puck seems to be moving next. We'll keep you updated as this story develops.