When in Doubt, Go Up: Orbital Data Centers and the Limits of Architectural Imagination

Two weeks ago, a company filed paperwork with the FCC requesting permission to launch up to one million satellites into low Earth orbit. Not communication satellites. Not GPS. Data center satellites. Solar-powered, laser-linked orbital compute nodes, designed to run AI inference workloads from space. The filing included the phrase "first step towards becoming a Kardashe II-level civilization." That's a reference to harnessing the full power of a star. For context, we're currently a Kardashe 0.7.