Google and SpaceX are in talks about something that a few years ago would have sounded like science fiction - launching data centres into orbit. According to a Wall Street Journal source, the two companies are weighing a joint operation that would rework the bills for compute power in the AI era with completely new infrastructure - the kind above the atmosphere.

The timing isn't accidental. SpaceX is preparing for an IPO worth 1.75 trillion dollars by the end of the year, and orbital data centres are one of the stories used to sell investors a vision of the future. Elon Musk has been arguing for months that work in orbit will be cheaper than terrestrial data centres - once the technology matures - and that it eliminates local protests against giant land-based facilities.

The numbers don't yet favour him. Building and launching a satellite remains expensive enough to make orbital computing economically pointless compared to any ordinary data centre on Earth. But Musk and Google are playing the long game - if launch costs fall (and Starship is promising exactly that), the calculation can flip.

Google isn't putting all its chips on one square. The company is simultaneously talking to other launch firms and already has its own project - Project Suncatcher, announced late last year, with a first prototype satellite scheduled for 2027. In other words, Google is doing what it always does - parallel negotiations with all players, so that none of them can hold it to ransom.

There's another note - Anthropic recently signed a deal with SpaceX to use compute resources from the xAI data centre in Memphis. The same circle of companies with the same ending - orbit.

History between Google and SpaceX already exists. Back in 2015, Google invested 900 million dollars in SpaceX. Now they are expanding the partnership to levels that ten years ago were considered theoretical. The question isn't „if" - the question is „when". And who will pay for the energy crunch that may follow when the planet sends its servers into the sky.