Environmental issues are increasingly entrenched in the collective consciousness, whether through climate activists’ decisions about which artworks deserve to be thrown at their soup, or through attendance (and blatant absence) at the UN Climate Change Conference. Meanwhile, as noticed RecordThe European Commission (EC) is exploring radical ideas for reducing the climate impact of data centers and other HPC (high performance computing) deployments. Concepts involve placing them completely outside the Earth’s atmosphere, into the deep darkness of space.

The ASCEND (short for European Net-zero emissions and Advanced Space Cloud for Data Sovereignty) feasibility study is part of the EU’s Horizon Europe initiative and is supported by a €2 million budget. It also relies on several partners in the fields of environmental protection, cloud computing and space technology, led by Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture between European aerospace and defense companies Thales and Leonardo. According to Thales Alenia Space, TEO’s main motivation is not performance, durability or energy efficiency. Instead, these elements have been incorporated into the broader environmental picture of tackling emissions from operating data centers.

It’s easy to see how space data centers can be a boon to the environment. Because they are outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, the emissions associated with their operation will no longer affect our planet. Reducing this value to zero will be impossible, as most components will have to be manufactured within our “pale blue dot” planet (except for carbon offset programs associated with new data centers). But even as companies improve the energy efficiency of their hardware products from generation to generation, the increasing performance demands of the latest HPC hardware from any major hardware vendor have resulted in continued growth of the energy (and environmental) footprint. This is exactly what ASCEND aims to solve. Source