Just a moonshot? Google energy head claims data centers in space would cost up to 100x more than on Earth

Google global head of data center energy says space data centers could cost up to 100 times more than terrestrial ones
Amanda Peterson Corio’s remarks came weeks after Google launched its first Suncatcher prototype, a roughly 1kW satellite that has since run Gemma 4 on an orbiting TPU, one chip at a time
Corio says the real bottleneck on Earth is permitting rather than power, the same politics that backers of orbital compute claim they can escape

Google has spent the past month showing off AI chips working in orbit, but the executive responsible for powering its data centers back on Earth has just put a sobering price on the idea.

Speaking at The Information’s recent WTF Summit in Napa Valley, Amanda Peterson Corio, Google’s global head of data center energy, said data centers in space could cost up to 100 times as much as those built on the ground.

Her advice to the rest of the industry was simple and (pun intended) grounded: “Let’s explore all the terrestrial options before we go extraterrestrial.”

A very expensive proposition?

The remarks land at an awkward moment, because Google is testing exactly this kind of hardware right now. Its first Project Suncatcher prototype, built with satellite operator Planet, launched on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission on October 1.

Google recently also announced its Hello World milestone: an onboard Gemma 4 model, running on a TPU, wrote a short haiku about being in space, which was downlinked as the satellite passed over Svalbard, Norway.

The company bills this as the first AI response from a data center-class TPU in orbit. That is a carefully measured claim, given that Starcloud put an Nvidia H100 into orbit a year ago and was running AI models on it within weeks.

Scale is the bigger caveat and one that can be easily overlooked amidst the hype: The satellite carries four TPUs but generates only about 1kW of solar power, so it can run just one chip at a time for roughly 20 minutes per session, according to The Next Web. A single 1 GW AI campus, the kind now under construction on the ground, draws about a million times that much power.

Google has described Suncatcher as a “moonshot” since it was unveiled a year ago, and project lead Travis Beals told NPR on launch day that he did not expect orbital compute to become cheaper than the terrestrial kind within the next five years.

Not the first or last skeptic of orbital datacenters

This did start a somewhat interesting conversation on Wall Street; Short seller Jim Chanos read Corio’s statement as $5 trillion per gigawatt of compute, and posted on X that the gap between her view and the estimates of SpaceX management and bulls “should give pause to anyone trying to model this business out.”

TIKR pushed the arithmetic further by examining recent claims: SpaceX’s CFO told investors last month that new compute pays for itself in under a year at current rental rates. Built in orbit at up to 100 times the cost and rented at the same price, TIKR calculated that payback stretches to as long as a century, or about a decade even at a tenth of Corio’s stated ceiling.

That matters because orbital compute underpins part of SpaceX’s roughly $1.8 trillion market value at the time of writing. The company has asked the FCC for permission to launch up to a million data-center satellites, and Musk has posted that the orbital compute SpaceX deploys each month will probably overtake terrestrial compute around the end of 2028. Yet SpaceX’s own IPO paperwork warned investors of “significant technical complexity and unproven technologies,” and said its orbital data centers might never become commercially viable.

Corio is hardly the first skeptic. OpenAI’s Sam Altman called the idea “ridiculous” under current conditions earlier this year, even as Nvidia lined up a Space-1 Vera Rubin module aimed squarely at orbital data centers.

This is an extremely interesting take from Google’s end. Alphabet is one of SpaceX’s largest outside shareholders, with a stake disclosed at 6.11% at the end of 2025, according to Bloomberg, and Google has reportedly been in talks with SpaceX about launching future Suncatcher hardware. Its energy chief has questioned and potentially poured cold water on a thesis that props up part of an asset Alphabet owns, while Google’s own moonshot depends on cheap SpaceX launches arriving on schedule.

Corio’s broader argument, somewhat ironically, was about the ground rather than the sky. According to The Information, she said the US has enough power and that the real bottlenecks are permitting and grid interconnection studies.

She blamed much of the local backlash against data centers on newer, less experienced developers, without naming any, and said Google prepays for grid upgrades over 15 to 20 years in more than 9 states, posts restoration bonds, and has stopped using nondisclosure agreements with local governments.

There is, however, a problem with this argument: Established firms such as Oracle have also faced local resistance, which complicates the idea that inexperienced newcomers are the problem. The backlash is anything but marginal: opposition has spread across the US, and Data Center Watch counted 75 projects worth about $130 billion delayed or blocked in the first quarter of 2026 alone.

There is a political angle built around these arguments that keeps orbital data centers in play, and SpaceX is essentially building on that promise. After this week’s midterm elections, in which data center construction was a campaign issue in several races, including the contest for Texas governor, Musk posted, “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now.”

Leaving the planet does not, however, mean leaving the permit queue; SpaceX’s million-satellite request and Blue Origin’s 51,600-satellite Project Sunrise both need FCC approval, and debris and spectrum concerns give regulators and rivals plenty to object to, just at a higher altitude. If power really is plentiful and permission is the bottleneck, as Corio argues, then orbit’s main selling point is jumping that queue, and by her numbers it is a very expensive way to do it.

For now, until someone flies more than a kilowatt-scale test bed and publishes what it actually costs, the multiple between orbit and the ground, whether it turns out to be 3x, 10x, or as much as 100x, remains an educated guess. Corio’s stated ceiling is arguably as unproven as Musk’s timetable. Only one of those numbers, however, is already priced in considerably into a stock’s current valuation, and SpaceX investors will be waiting for financials to back its CEO’s claims with bated breath to say the least.