Data centres in space: the server outside the law

In November 2025 a satellite was launched with an Nvidia H100 GPU on board. By December it was already running a Google model and training a small neural network four hundred-odd kilometres up. It is not a mock-up or an agency render: it is data-centre hardware working outside the atmosphere. And the moment that thing started computing, it stopped being an engineering problem and became something far more interesting.

There is already a high-end GPU going round over your head

The facts, unadorned. Starcloud launched its first satellite carrying an H100 in November 2025, and in December it ran the Gemini model and Andrej Karpathy's nano-GPT on it. Google presented Project Suncatcher: constellations of satellites with their own TPU chips, low orbit synchronised with sunrise and sunset at around 650 kilometres, optical inter-satellite links of the order of ten terabits per second, and a reference configuration of eighty-one satellites flying in close formation. Two prototypes planned with Planet Labs for early 2027. In May 2026 it emerged that Google and SpaceX were negotiating the launches.

The technical argument is solid and dull, which is how solid technical arguments usually are: in a dawn-dusk orbit a solar panel receives light almost continuously and can be up to eight times more productive than on the ground. There is no night, there are no clouds, there is no negotiating with any county's electricity grid or explaining to a town council why its aquifer is going to cool a language model.

What is not solved is almost everything else. Google tested its Trillium-generation TPUs in a particle accelerator simulating low-orbit radiation and the chips held up, but the HBM memory threw uncorrectable errors at a rate they describe as tolerable for inference. Translated: it works for answering, it is not yet clear that it works for thinking. And the economics are brutal. An analysis by the aerospace engineer Andrew McCalip puts a gigawatt of solar compute in orbit at around 51.1 billion dollars against 15.9 billion on the ground. Google's own document places the break-even at a launch cost close to 200 dollars per kilo, a figure that does not exist today.

There is a case file that appears in no police station. I wrote it for readers who want to see how an investigation that has not happened yet gets documented from the inside: what goes on the record, what is left out, and who decides the second. It is sent by email, and only to those who ask for it.

Article VIII settled this in 1967, and that is why it is uncomfortable

This is where my job and what I write cross in a way I did not expect.

When a piece of data turns up in an investigation that is not on a seized device but on a company's server, the first question is not what it contains. It is where it is and who you have to ask for it. That question governs the entire timetable: it defines the cooperation channel, the deadline and, very often, whether the data will still exist by the time the authorisation arrives. The Convention on Cybercrime, done at Budapest on 23 November 2001 and ratified by Spain with publication in the BOE of 17 September 2010, devotes its Article 16 to the expedited preservation of stored computer data for exactly that reason: because between knowing a piece of data exists and being able to request it lawfully there is a gap the evidence falls through.

The geography of the server decides the timetable of the case. That is not an opinion, it is routine.

Now lift it 650 kilometres. The legal answer exists and is older than the internet: Article VIII of the Outer Space Treaty, signed on 27 January 1967 and in force for Spain since 27 November 1968, establishes that the State on whose registry a launched object is carried retains jurisdiction and control over it while it is in space. A server in orbit is not in no man's land: it is under the law of the country that registered it, and only that one.

That is the point almost nobody is looking at. The problem is not that there is no law in orbit. It is that there is exactly one, chosen by whoever launches, with no local territory to hold on to, no European headquarters to summon, no possibility of saying that the machine is here. And it leaves questions nobody has answered today: what is an international data transfer when the destination is in no country? Which data-residency rules are you complying with while orbiting over twenty States in ninety minutes?

Gibson put the mainframe in Berne for a reason

Science fiction got here first, but not by the route it is usually credited with.

In Neuromancer, from 1984, Wintermute's processors are in Berne. Not in cyberspace, not in an abstract cloud: in Switzerland. And there is a Turing Police answering to Geneva. Gibson understood forty years ahead of time that the physical location of an artificial intelligence is not a technical detail but a legal decision, and that whoever takes it is choosing which police force can knock on the door. The whole plot depends on it.

What has aged badly is not his technology. It is his geography. Gibson could still point at a country on a map. Orbit removes the map and leaves only the registry: an administrative entry in a drawer in Washington, in Beijing, or wherever it happens to be.

I have written on this blog that what I miss about modern science fiction is exactly this kind of work: taking an uncomfortable consequence and following it to the end instead of decorating it with neon. Orbital data centres are a gift to the genre and a trap. The gift is the image. The trap is stopping there.

What a server in orbit does to a novel

If the story is that the AI is in space because it looks spectacular, there is no story: there is an expensive set. What has to be told is what that orbit enables.

An orbital data centre is critical infrastructure with no postal address, no neighbours, no labour inspectorate, no possible cut in supply, no door that can be sealed. It is the first object in history on which decisions affecting millions of people can be executed and which, physically, nobody can go in and look at. Not even with a warrant.

When I wrote The Loop I was less interested in the power of an absolute artificial intelligence than in the chain of custody around it: who can inspect it, with what paperwork in hand, and in how long. A server 650 kilometres up does not make the machine any cleverer. It makes everyone who wants to check what it is doing slower and more expensive. And in a procedure, that delay is not a detail: it is the margin.

The interesting science fiction of the next decade is not going to be in the satellite. It is going to be in the office where somebody is trying, and failing, to draft the right request.

How many years do you give the first Spanish court order that has to request data from a server which, at the time of the events, was 650 kilometres above Albacete?

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