The world’s digital infrastructure is expanding at an unprecedented rate, driving innovation but also straining planetary resources. Data centers are fast-becoming among the planet’s biggest resource consumers, utilizing increasing amounts of land, water, and energy. 

But in space, they promise a lighter touch.

Allow me to explain.

First, the water dilemma. While often overlooked, cooling is a major operational challenge for terrestrial data centers. Nearly 40% of their energy needs are, in fact, devoted to cooling. It’s also incredibly water-intensive. A recent Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report found that in 2023, U.S. data centers consumed about 17 billion gallons of water. Some estimates project those numbers could as much as quadruple by 2028; the equivalent use of nearly half a million U.S. households.

In fact, right now, some facilities guzzle down as much as 1.8 million gallons per day. Google’s data centers alone used more than 8 billion gallons of water in 2024. And that represents a critical challenge to those of us on Earth, especially when it happens in water-scarce regions where many expansions are now planned. 

Solution: In orbit, Sophia’s systems rely on radiative cooling to deep space, which rejects heat directly through thermal radiation: no evaporative water systems, no chillers, and no HVAC losses.

Second, power availability. The global data center industry already consumes roughly 1.5% of the world’s electricity, with the U.S. accounting for most of that usage (45%), followed by China (25%) and Europe (15%). But if you look at broader trends, data center power consumption has also steadily climbed by about 12% annually since 2017; roughly four times faster than the rate of total electricity consumption. And although many terrestrial data centers are now transitioning to renewable energy, they’re still vulnerable to grid constraints, weather variability, and energy storage limitations. 

Solution: In orbit, solar arrays operate at near-continuous efficiency, exposed to about 30% greater solar irradiance than ground installations and free from weather or atmospheric losses. Solar arrays on NASA’s International Space Station (ISS), for instance, generate up to 120 kilowatts around the clock, unhindered by atmosphere or night cycles. 

Third, the land issue. Land use rarely enters the sustainability conversation, yet data campuses can span hundreds of acres.

Then your “solution” line lands more sharply. Tech giants collectively operate thousands of data centers worldwide. These complexes vary in size, but are often large enough to displace greenfield land, contributing to habitat loss and non-residential urban sprawl. 

Solution: Orbital data centers, by contrast, eliminate terrestrial land use altogether.

Of course, orbital data is also not a panacea. Challenges like launch costs, maintenance, and manufacturing will inevitably remain. In fact, given the demand, we’ll likely need both terrestrial and orbital infrastructure. But these systems can lighten the load. In fact, the benefits of space-based infrastructure are increasingly difficult to dismissis almost impossible to ignore, particularly in light of an AI-fueled revolution that demands ever-more land, water, and energy to process exponentially larger amounts of information. 

This demand is driven by explosive data growth: For context, global data traffic hit 68 exabytes in 2024. That’s a 15% increase from 59 exabytes in 2023, and a 113% rise from 2020, when traffic was just 32 exabytes.

To keep pace (while also protecting the planet) we’ll need to think differently about data … where it’s stored and processed … and how it’s cooled and powered.

At Sophia Space, that’s just what we’re doing. By combining solar technologies with advanced thermal management and scalable satellite design, modular, sustainable data centers – i.e. TILES – are setting the stage for a future where our data is not only abundant and accessible, but also responsible and green. Sophia Space is demonstrating that orbital computing can complement terrestrial networks, expanding capacity without expanding our footprint.