The tech industry is in the midst of a $3 trillion datacentre building spree, from Texas to Brazil. But Google’s “Project Suncatcher” suggests the company may see this as a bubble—an unsustainable boom that will be crushed by resource scarcity and energy costs.
This $3 trillion spend on “earthbound datacenters” is causing “rising concern” about its impact on carbon emissions and its “impact on terrestrial resources” like land and water. Google’s plan to “minimize” this impact by moving to space is, in effect, a search for an escape hatch.
The company’s research, released Tuesday, provides the “out.” It suggests that as rocket costs fall, the “comparable” running costs of a space datacentre (by the mid-2030s) will make it a superior long-term investment. The key is “unlimited, low-cost renewable energy” from 8-times-more-productive solar panels.
This makes the $3 trillion terrestrial spend look like a potentially bad bet—the last gasp of an old paradigm. Google’s “moonshot” is a bet that the future of scaling AI lies in bypassing Earth’s limitations entirely.
While Google itself is still participating in the terrestrial boom, “Project Suncatcher” is a clear signal that it is actively developing a disruptive alternative. With competitors like Musk and Nvidia also looking to space, the $3 trillion “bubble” may be more fragile than it appears.