On Tuesday, a wave of Democratic candidates took the national midterms, including many in Texas — a key US data-centre hub and home to Elon Musk's SpaceX. Many of the victorious candidates had publicly opposed the data-centre industry, which sent the tech community into a frenzy overnight.
Within hours, data-centre advocates on social media were still insisting they were "bullish" on the sector — just not in Texas, and not even on Earth. The new slogan: data centres in space.
Musk, who poured more than $400 million of his personal fortune into Republican candidates that all lost, was among the first to get on board, posting on X in the early hours of Wednesday, "Data centres in space look pretty attractive right now."
圖片：U.S. Air Force / Trevor Cokley／Public domain／Wikimedia Commons
Jordan Lasker, the man behind the X account "Crémieux" — a popular account in tech circles known for pushing racist pseudoscience — also weighed in: "Data centres in space are an amazing idea, and anyone who doubted them didn't think enough about tonight's election results."
Throughout the day, Musk employees, tech investors, AI researchers and venture capitalists all joined the chorus. Soham Mehta, a fellow at the techno-optimist think tank Foundation for American Innovation, suggested underwater data centres should also be on the table — though China, it should be noted, has claimed the world's first such facility since June.
Some firms are already working on putting compute into orbit: Google has launched a satellite carrying what it calls a "data-centre-class TPU"; SpaceX is planning to deploy thousands of AI satellites from late 2027; Blue Origin has filed an FCC application for 50,000 satellites making up an "orbital data-centre system". Startup Starcloud claims to have put the first Nvidia H100 GPU into orbit in November 2025.
圖片：Debbie Rowe／CC BY-SA 3.0／Wikimedia Commons
But experts are reminding everyone that a space data centre is far costlier than a ground-based one, cannot scale to hyperscale, and depends on the vagaries of every single launch.
On the Texas side, the tech bros' worries are not entirely baseless: Democrats now hold the state House, though Republicans still hold the state Senate, so immediate policy shifts — such as reallocating state agency resources — are likely to be held up to some extent, according to University of Texas at Austin land-use professor Robert Paterson.
姣姐講多句 The irony here is pretty rich: the man who staked $400 million of his own money on the losing side and lost it all, is now the one advocating for moving data centres into space. Whether it's genuine engineering foresight or just saving face after a political wipeout — that one's up to you to decide.
