OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has ridiculed the idea of orbital data centres amid a dedicated push by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to power AI development from space. The idea is being explored by Google as well, according to CEO Sundar Pichai, with the search giant set to take its first step soon.
Asked about the feasibility of the idea during his visit to New Delhi for the India AI Impact Summit 2026, Altman told Indian Express, “Putting data centres in space with the current landscape is ridiculous.”
“Orbital data centres are not going to matter at scale this decade due to the rough math of launch costs and how hard it is to fix a broken GPU in space,” the Open AI CEO explained.
However, acknowledging that that there would “come a time” for orbital data centres, Altman said, “We’re not there yet.”
Musk’s orbital data centre push
Altman’s comments come at a time when Elon Musk has been vocally pushing for data centres in space.
“The lowest-cost place to put AI will be in space, and that will be true within two years, maybe three at the latest,” Musk said at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos this January.
Prior to his comments in January, Musk announced his ambitions at an all-hands meeting of xAI in December.
According to a report by Business Insider, Musk said that Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot could eventually man such orbital data centres.
Further, at an all-hands meeting with xAI employees this month, Musk also reportedly said that SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI would allow the company to deploy data centres in space faster.
SpaceX, meanwhile, has said its goal is to launch a “constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers.”
Business Insider reported that the company has already begun hiring engineers for the project.
Orbital data centres — a ‘moonshot’
Despite Altman’s comments, Musk isn’t the only one thinking of orbital data centres.
Google, too, have their eyes on space-based data centres, with CEO Sundar Pichai telling Fox News in December last that the idea was a “moonshot”.
“At Google, we’re always proud of taking moonshots. One of our moonshots is: How do we one day have data centers in space so that we can better harness the energy from the sun, which is one hundred trillion times more energy than we produce in all of Earth today?,” Pichai said.
And, according to the Pichai, Google is just one year away from beginning its journey.
“We are taking our first step in 2027. We’ll send tiny, tiny racks of machines, and have them in satellites, test them out, and then start scaling from there,” Pichai said.
The Google CEO also said that despite the idea of space-based structures sounding outlandish now, it would become normal soon enough.
“There’s no doubt to me that a decade or so away we’ll be viewing it as a more normal way to build data centers,” he said.
Business Insider also reported that Google has already been quietly working towards this goal, a project internally known as Project Suncatcher.
Orbital data centres are being viewed as a way to meet the massive energy requirements of AI development without the environmental costs of terrestrial data centres.
