Altman fires back at Musk over space data center ambitions

Sam Altman hit back at Elon Musk with a pointed line about orbiting compute, telling him, "homeboy you're the one sellling [sic] public market investors on short-term space datacenters." The remark landed inside a long-running feud between two men who co-founded OpenAI before splitting publicly and turning their rivalry into a mix of personal attacks and lawsuits.

SpaceX filed with the Federal Communications Commission on January 30, 2026, seeking approval for an orbital data center constellation of up to 1 million satellites in low Earth orbit. The filing pushed Musk’s space-compute ambitions from a concept floated in the AI boom into an active regulatory matter, with the FCC now reviewing a proposal large enough to raise questions about spectrum, deployment, and the scale of the launch campaign it would require.

The Government Accountability Office's June 2026 spotlight found that space-based data centers could cut land, electricity, and water use on Earth, but it also warned that heat rejection in space is a major challenge because the vacuum does not disperse heat efficiently. Power, cooling, and communications systems still need to be developed without becoming too large or too heavy to launch, and the support systems needed to deploy and operate such facilities remain unproven.

Space offers abundant solar power and, in theory, a naturally cold environment. The practical problems of moving power, shedding heat, and maintaining communications in orbit remain substantial. Voyager Technologies chief executive Dylan Taylor said in February 2026 that a two-year timeline for space data centers would be "aggressive" and said cooling remained a major barrier. Google’s Project Suncatcher plans two prototype satellites with Planet by early 2027 to test hardware in orbit.