SpaceX, Google Eye Orbital Data Centers As Small-Town Resistance Grows

With roughly half of planned U.S. data center buildouts this year expected to be delayed or canceled amid mounting power constraints and local opposition, tech bros are increasingly looking beyond Earth and toward space for the next phase of compute expansion.

This dovetails with one of our most investable themes, “Data Centers In Space Are Coming: Here’s How To Profit,” in which we outlined how SpaceX, leveraging Starship’s affordable launch costs and the Starlink network, could make it commercially viable to deploy spacecraft packed with chip stacks and build out a massive mesh network of orbital compute satellites.

Moments ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google is in discussions with Elon Musk’s SpaceX as a key launch provider for orbital data center deployments.

WSJ: Google is in talks with SpaceX for a rocket launch deal as the search giant expands its own efforts to put orbital data centers in space.

The speculative technology has been at the center of SpaceX’s pitch to investors ahead of its planned public listing this summer

A… https://t.co/eg9yE3J1Uz

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 12, 2026

The discussions center on potential Starship launches for Google’s Project Suncatcher, which aims to test satellite-based computing hardware by 2027, the outlet reported, citing sources.

“We’ll send tiny racks of machines and have them in satellites, test them out, and then start scaling from there,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Fox News in a recent interview.

Pichai noted, “There’s no doubt to me that a decade or so away, we’ll be viewing it as a more normal way to build data centers.”

With the SpaceX IPO scheduled for June and commanding a valuation between $1.25 trillion and $1.75 trillion, we recently outlined for readers exactly how to profit from the commercialization of space. Read more here.

The urgency for orbital data center deployments comes as Canaccord Genuity analyst George Gianarikas warned in mid-April that “the American data center boom is hitting a formidable wall of logistical friction.”

Gianarikas is referring to the latest outlook by Sightline Climate, which is also reinforced by recent articles from Bloomberg and others, and reveals a sobering reality for 2026: nearly half of the nation’s planned 16-gigawatt capacity faces cancellation or delay, with only 5 gigawatts currently under construction.

This inertia stems from a volatile mix of local permitting hurdles, community resistance, and a desperate reliance on overextended global supply chains for critical components like transformers and helium.

Mounting localized resistance against data centers has caused growing alarm among the tech bro world, such as Chamath Palihapitiya, founder of Social Capital and co-host of the All-In Podcast, who recently warned that data center sentiment among the American people is actually polling worse than ICE agents.

Hyperscalers are planning to spend a staggering $700 billion in capex on data center buildouts and other AI infrastructure this year.

We expect capex commitments toward orbital data centers to accelerate over the next several years, especially as Starship shifts from years of flight testing into full commercialization.

Starcloud…

.@Starcloud_ plans to build a 5GW orbital data center, lower energy costs by 10x, and reduce the need for energy consumption on Earth, including deployment of the Starcloud-1 satellite powered by an NVIDIA H100 GPU. pic.twitter.com/yPEddTWnh7

— NVIDIA Robotics (@NVIDIARobotics) May 11, 2026

For hyperscalers facing mounting constraints on land, power, permitting, and local opposition, space offers no zoning battles, no community resistance, and full access to solar energy.