As AI and high-performance computing drive exponential demand for processing power, this white paper examines how orbital data centers could overcome many of the energy, land, and cooling constraints facing terrestrial facilities. Rather than treating power generation and thermal management as engineering afterthoughts, it argues they must be central architectural considerations from the outset. The paper highlights how flight-proven technologies—including deployable solar arrays, advanced radiators, modular spacecraft, and autonomous operations—can enable scalable space-based computing, while emphasizing the need for tightly integrated power, heat rejection, and compute systems. It concludes that with continued advances in launch capabilities and modular design, orbital data centers could become a foundational layer of future AI, cloud, and high-performance computing infrastructure.

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