As AI’s appetite for compute collides with the limits of power grids, land, water, and local politics, a new frontier is emerging: orbital data centres. This episode explores how SpaceX’s financial pivot into AI infrastructure, huge hyperscaler contracts, and the promise of space-based compute could reshape the economics of artificial intelligence—and turn low Earth orbit into the next industrial platform.

But the dream of putting AI in space comes with brutal physical realities: cooling chips in a vacuum, surviving launch vibration, radiation damage, launch costs, carbon debt, orbital debris, and the need for asteroid mining and in-space manufacturing. At the heart of it is a bigger question: if intelligence keeps scaling, can Earth alone supply the infrastructure it demands? I’ve been using AI deep research to do the research and NotebookLM to create a podcast in the hopes of learning more about this once-in-a-lifetime AI revolution, which I’ve made public here through this channel.