The compute is leaving the planet

Google and SpaceX are in advanced talks to put data centers in orbit. The pitch is straightforward: terrestrial AI compute is hitting limits — power, cooling, regulation, land — that orbital compute may not face. Solar irradiance in space is constant. Cooling is, in the right configuration, a vacuum problem. The marginal cost of an additional megawatt-class facility in low earth orbit is being modelled as competitive with terrestrial siting within the decade. This is the most underprocessed sto ...

The deeper signal: this is happening because the system has discovered that it can do this. Not because we decided. The terrestrial constraints reached a threshold; the orbital math became favourable; the actors with the capability — one in Mountain View, one in Hawthorne — are now executing. The decision that compute should remain on earth was never made. Its opposite is now being made, quietly, by two private companies. The civilisational substrate is being migrated by the people who happen to own the means of migration. Everyone else will receive the consequences as weather.