Google’s first orbital data center is in orbit (October 1st). They say it is about the size of a fridge.
It has one kilowatt of solar power. It is about the power of a household.
It was launched on a Falcon 9 rocket (SpaceX).
It should run for about a year. Google plans to launch two more orbital data centres next year. The plan is to use laser communications.
For people complaining that the latency is going to be a problem with orbital data centres…
An orbital data centre can be effectively in your line of sight and it can be relatively close (much closer than the diameter of the USA).
Further if you have a cluster of space data centres, they can remain close and in a line of sight.
So you are not going to run your video games or do high frequency trading from space, but for compute, latency is unlikely to be the bottleneck.
The great features are space (no need to wait five years for a permit) and power (no need to negotiate with a local government for electricity). Solar power in space is great because it runs 24h a day.
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