Climate change: EU wants to move data centers into space

Data centers require more and more electricity as a result of the immense increase in data. Against this background, the European Union has now a study to examine whether data centers could also be relocated into space in the future. Outside the earth's atmosphere, the climate on the earthly planet would no longer be endangered. The power supply could be provided by solar panels, while the data connection to Earth could be made via lasers.

Implementation is now being examined by the French Space company Thales. However, there is one hurdle: The data centers could not simply be built in space on a large scale. The feasibility study will now be used to evaluate how the hardware could be put into space, where it would be parked and how it could be maintained by robots.

Many safety-related questions

Ultimately, however, safety issues also play a decisive role. It is true that data centers in space would be a long-term project for climate protection, since the environment would be cold anyway and thus require less electricity for cooling. However, what about, for example, commissioning or service procedures in the event of technical problems or orbital damage - or how would such data centers be protected against attacks?

The first step is to examine how many CO2 emissions are generated during the construction of the infrastructures and how these would compare with the construction of conventional data centers. After all, a lot of money has been invested in the feasibility study, so implementation should not be ruled out from the outset.

Source: deutschlandfunknova.de/editorial office