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Sophia Space and Caltech want to fold the bulky parts of a space-based data center—solar cells and radiators—into all-in-one tiles with chips.
Every time you ask ChatGPT a question, computer chips in a massive data center whirl into action. In the blink of an eye, they ping back answers. Behind the scenes, though, AI data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity, heat, and water.
The AI boom is impacting communities. After welcoming 37 data centers, residents in Virginia’s Henrico County were hit with skyrocketing electrical bills. Schools and government buildings were asked to turn off lights, shut down computers, and avoid using space heaters to ease strain on the power grid and keep costs down.
Henrico isn’t alone. A growing backlash is prompting many states to consider legislation curbing new facilities. “No data center” signs have sprouted on lawns and alongside roads. Yet as AI demand continues to surge, so does the need for more computing power.
This has top AI companies looking skyward. Instead of routing requests to terrestrial data centers, future queries could be handled by thousands of solar-powered satellites orbiting above. The results would then be beamed back, with users none the wiser.
But there’s a major hurdle: heat.
Space’s frigid vacuum may seem like the perfect place to cool chips, but it’s not that simple. Lacking air and water to carry heat away, orbital data centers would have to use thermal radiation. Here, heat is converted into infrared energy and radiated into space, often requiring bulky hardware that adds weight, cost, and complexity.
With these challenges in mind, California Institute of Technology and Sophia Space, a California startup developing orbital computing, recently unveiled a patent for a chip cooling system designed to radiate heat into deep space. Called Sophia TILE, thousands of these chips could be linked to form large orbital data centers or organized into smaller, distributed clusters.
Powered by abundant sunlight, the chips could operate continuously without eating up Earth’s resources. The team hopes to test their vision by 2030.
“This patent reflects a different way of thinking about computer infrastructure in space,” said Leon Alkalai, founder and chief technology officer at Sophia Space, in a press release. “Instead of beaming down energy to Earth from orbit, we decided to consider putting computing in space and beam[ing] down data.”
The project joins a growing international push towards orbital computing. ADA Space, working with Zhejiang Lab, has already launched satellites for its Three-Body Computing Constellation and plans to expand into a much larger network. Meanwhile, US companies including SpaceX, Starcloud, and Blue Origin are seeking regulatory approval for constellations that could eventually grow to include up to a million AI-capable satellites.
Without doubt, the race is on.
Orbital data centers would consist of high-performance computer chips housed in protective enclosures designed to withstand the harsh conditions of space. In orbit, they would collect uninterrupted solar power. In contrast, solar panels on Earth require batteries to store energy for use after sunset.
Solar power in space is hardly new. The International Space Station, satellites, and other spacecraft have long relied on solar panels. More recently, engineers have developed flexible, lightweight designs such as NASA’s Roll-Out Solar Arrays, which launch tightly rolled and unfurl in orbit.
AI, however, demands far more power. One long-standing idea for harvesting continuous solar power suggests we collect solar energy in space and beam it down to Earth. But that approach doesn’t completely appease the growing ire against data centers. They’d still consume energy on the ground and take up land and other resources. A newer idea flips the question. Rather than delivering energy to computers, why not bring computers nearer to the energy source?
The argument in favor of sending data centers skyward is growing stronger. A recent Gallup poll found roughly 70 percent of Americans oppose data centers in their backyard, while experts agree that meeting AI’s future energy demands on Earth alone will become increasingly unsustainable.
But while power is abundant in space, heat is the main problem. Without air or water to carry heat away, computers in space must rely on thermal radiation. That means adding large, heavy radiators to an already bulky, solar-powered setup. In space, weight is money, and scaling orbital data centers will take a lot of it (to put it mildly).
TILE tackles the cooling problem with a specialized material that converts heat into infrared radiation. The concept may seem alien, but everything warmer than absolute zero cools this way. Our bodies, stovetops, and car engines all shed heat as invisible infrared light.
Each TILE combines solar cells, thermal insulation, processors, memory, and optical communication hardware into a single module. Beneath the electronics sits a custom heat-spreading layer that prevents dangerous hot spots. Like placing a scorching pan onto a baking sheet, it distributes heat over a much larger surface before channeling it to the radiator.
The modules are designed to work together. Thousands of TILES could link into a giant computing mosaic, each acting as a mini computer connected to its neighbors. Like a modern power grid, the distributed architecture improves reliability—if one TILE fails, others can jump in—while simplifying power distribution and thermal management.
The modular design also solves a practical challenge: Rockets don’t have much cargo space. Similar to NASA’s Roll-Out Solar Arrays, a TILE-based data center could launch in a compact configuration before unfolding into a large, flat computing platform in orbit.
Looking further ahead, the team envisions launching multiple interconnected arrays in succession, like strings of pearls. Each could function as an independent data center that exchanges data with others, effectively extending cloud computing into orbit.
Sophia Space is targeting a demonstration mission in late 2027. By 2030, the team estimates an array of 2,000 TILEs could deliver up to a megawatt of dedicated computing power. To put that in perspective, a single ground-based data center can deliver hundreds of megawatts of computing power, and future data centers will stretch that number into the thousands.
There are challenges beyond the purely technical. Earth orbit is crowded with active spacecraft and debris, raising the risk of collisions. SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, for example, perform frequent collision-avoidance maneuvers after a close call in 2019. The breakup of a Chinese Long March rocket in 2024 threatened an estimated 1,000 satellites. Large constellations of data centers—SpaceX has plans for up to a million in low Earth orbit—would add even more traffic.
Beyond collisions, astronomers are worried that expanding satellite numbers could hinder our ability to study the universe by interfering with telescope observations and radio astronomy.
For now, orbital data centers are unlikely to replace their terrestrial counterparts. Instead, they’re more likely to complement them, processing data collected by spacecraft and beaming only the results back to Earth. Although the field is ridden with hype and controversy, there’s also promise and momentum is clearly building.
“It’s just kind of exploding,” Sergio Pellegrino, a Caltech engineer who collaborates with Sophia Space, told The New York Times. “We need to become more comfortable with space doing things for us.”
The post Heat Is an Orbital Data Center’s Greatest Foe. These Tiles Dump It at the Source. appeared first on SingularityHub.
An implant, smaller than a grain of rice, pairs with camera-mounted glasses to communicate visual information to the retina.
Age-related vision loss affects millions of people, and so far, there has been no way to reverse the damage. A newly approved retinal implant could change that by allowing some people with severe vision loss to regain functional sight.
More than five million people worldwide suffer from geographic atrophy, the late stage of the progressive eye condition dry age-related macular degeneration. The disease destroys the photoreceptors at the center of the retina, known as the macula, which is responsible for the sharp central vision required to read or recognize faces.
In the US, treatment options are limited to two drugs that can be injected into the eye to slow the disease’s progression. But neither can undo the damage. That could be about to change. California neurotech startup Science Corporation recently won European approval for a retinal implant designed to treat the condition.
“For decades, losing central vision to this disease meant losing the ability to read, recognize faces, and ultimately losing independence. There was no viable treatment. Now there is,” Max Hodak, Science’s CEO and co-founder, said in a press release.
The company’s PRIMA system combines an implant smaller than a grain of rice installed underneath the patient’s macula with a pair of camera-mounted glasses that translate incoming visual information into near-infrared light that is then beamed to the retina. The eye can’t detect this wavelength, so the device doesn’t interfere with any natural sight that remains.
The chip, which works on similar principles to a solar panel, converts the incoming light into electrical pulses that stimulate retinal neurons called bipolar cells. These are downstream of the rod and cone photoreceptor cells damaged by macular degeneration and normally spared by the disease.
In a clinical trial involving 38 patients across five countries, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year, the company and its collaborators showed participants gained an average of 25.5 letters—more than five lines—on a standard eye chart after having the device fitted.
And now the device has received a CE mark from the European Union making it possible to sell in 30 European countries. The company says the first commercial implants are expected to be fitted in Germany within weeks, with Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK to follow. In the US, PRIMA holds Breakthrough and Humanitarian Use Device designations from the FDA, but the company is confident it will gain full approval in the near future.
The device is a long way from restoring normal vision. The images it produces are black and white and the field of vision is extremely narrow. Hodak described the experience to the Financial Times as “kind of like looking through a straw in the center of their vision,” though he added that they see a pathway to color vision and higher acuity.
While the implantation procedure is fairly simple, it takes months of training to unlock the device’s full potential. Nonetheless, Hodak told STAT that the company expects to install 20 to 40 devices this year and 200 globally by the end of next if they get US approval in early 2027.
The approval is welcome news for the wider neurotech industry, which has absorbed billions of dollars of investment in recent years with little to show in terms of return.
“Science is showing that brain-computer interface companies have a path to real revenue now,” Jacob Robinson, founder of startup Motif Neuroscience, told STAT. “These companies aren’t all just making a bet on a market that is 10 to 15 years away.”
Hodak told the Financial Times hehopes sales from PRIMA will bankroll Science’s more ambitious work on “biohybrid” interfaces, which use genetically engineered living neurons to connect to the brain rather than metallic wires. “This is the financial backbone,” he said. “This is the thing that pays for the rest.”
Other companies are hot on Science’s heels. Neuralink, which Hodak co-founded with Elon Musk before leaving to start Science, is also working on a vision implant called Blindsight, which is due to enter human trials this year.
While the field remains a long way from the sci-fi vision of seamless two-way communication between humans and machines, this approval is growing evidence the neurotech industry is starting to move out of the lab and into the real world.
The post Europe Approves Bionic Eye to Restore Vision Lost to Blindness appeared first on SingularityHub.
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