From Grid to Orbit: Space Data Centers & Economy at Scale

A workshop on building data centers in space — infrastructure, technology, logistics, and policies — connecting industry, government, and academia.

This workshop brings together participants from industry, government, and academia to explore both research frontiers and practical challenges in building data centers and computing infrastructure in orbital environments.

As data center expansion on Earth places growing demands on existing power grids and water systems, computing in orbit is emerging as a bold complement to terrestrial infrastructure. Our goal is to identify emerging issues and possible collaborations toward building large-scale space data centers — and to define how each sector can contribute to this integrated effort, from earth-to-orbit supply chains to in-space assembly, operations, and policy.

Workshop Topics:

• In-space computing architectures and data-center infrastructure
• In-space manufacturing, assembly, and deployment
• Launch logistics, operations, and supply chain management — including earth-to-orbit supply chains connecting launch activities to “last-mile” logistics for in-space data center assembly
• Business models, investment, and economic viability
• Regulatory and policy landscape
• Environmental impact and sustainability — including terrestrial data center demands on power grids and water systems, and how the energy sector can benefit from in-space data centers
• AI and data workloads for orbital platforms
• Resilience, security, and fault tolerance
• In-space autonomous systems, human-robot interaction and teaming