DATA IN OUTER SPACE

To Sustainability And Beyond

BY WEI CHEN

Promoting responsible energy consumption by storing data centers... in outer space! Chen proposes a transcontinental collaboration between Alibaba Group and ConnectX to reduce cooling-related carbon emissions by storing data centers in space via a network of customized satellites.

Tech companies are responsible for producing up to three percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions1 with most of this industry’s carbon emissions coming from the construction of new data centers needed to match the advance of technological innovations. These centers store and process vast amounts of data and are at the core of all digital operations. They currently consume up to ten percent of the world’s electricity and almost half of that energy goes into cooling.2

As global dependency on electricityhungry data centers continues to grow, however, traditional air conditioning and fans can no longer keep up.3 Tech companies must therefore leverage their resources and knowledge to establish innovative approaches to sustainable data storage and usage.

With better and more efficient cooling technology, the tech industry can save billions of dollars in electricity while also aligning with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 12, namely, ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns. 4 This goal requires big tech companies to reduce carbon greenhouse gas emissions and decouple economic positives from environmental negatives. A partnership between the Alibaba Group and start-up satellite company ConnectX can further push the industry toward a more sustainable future. By relocating data centers and eventually migrating to the final frontier— space— tech companies can increase the productivity of their operations while also reducing their carbon footprint on the world.

Negative Consequences Of New Data Center Construction

Until the 1950s, data storage used to be kept on-site at companies, banks, and universities. As technology has advanced, growing shares of world data are now consolidated into warehouses with thousands of processors. Most of these warehouses still use traditional air conditioning. 5 Keeping servers cool in this manner requires such vast amounts of electricity that it is increasingly unsustainable. By way of illustration, Fortune reports that, from the beginning of time till the year 2002, “the world created five exabytes— five billion gigabytes— of information; today, we create that much data in about ten minutes.”6

Tech companies are failing to keep up with the exponential growth of data creation. These current data storage methods cannot handle that much information and their energy consumption poses a threat to sustainability. Already there are over seven million data centers around the world and the tech industry is investing billions of dollars into constructing more.7

China And Its Tech Industry Aim Toward Carbon Neutrality

As of 2019, the data center cooling equipment industry is valued at 10.5 billion USD, and it is growing by 13 percent each year.8 Western tech companies have already been shifting away from the traditional ways of cooling IT equipment and investing in this new industry.

China should also implement a more sustainable approach to data storage. Big Chinese tech companies, such as the Alibaba Group, have the resources to upgrade their data centers and invest in further research toward advanced cooling technologies. It is a move that cannot come too soon. In 2019, five nations were behind 60 percent of all global emissions; China alone generated about the same amount of emissions as the next four nations combined.9 Data centers in China reportedly used 160.9 billion kilowatt-hours of energy in 2018, which is more than the entire city of Shanghai in that year.10 If the country’s tech giants maintain the same levels of power consumption, Chinese data centers are predicted to produce about “163 million tons of carbon emissions” by next year— equivalent to that of a mid-sized nation.11

Since the Chinese government announced its carbon neutrality goal in 2021, however, the country’s tech giants have been at the vanguard of their country’s net-zero shift. The CCP has pledged to cap the country's carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and become carbon neutral before 2060. In response, Alibaba’s CEO Daniel Zhang recently announced a proposal to reduce 1.5 gigatons of carbon emissions by 2035. In the company’s 2020 Climate Report, the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were 9.514 million metric tons, which was more than a quarter of California’s yearly GHG emissions.12 Not surprising, around a third of the total emissions consisted of energy use and cooling in its data centers and more than half of the emissions were attributed to the purchase of electricity for leased data centers.

Relocating And Shifting To Remote Management

The metric used to describe the efficiency of data centers is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), and it is calculated by dividing the total data center energy consumption by the energy consumption of IT equipment. Locating data centers in a cold climate significantly helps lower PUE levels. As a result, the country of Norway has seen a rise in new data center construction by American tech companies, such as Microsoft and Meta. The Scandinavian country’s low temperature, “allows for both very efficient cooling and a large potential for excess heat utilization,” also known as heat waste.13

In China, the Alibaba Group’s Alibaba Cloud department is also utilizing the environment by, “erecting facilities in places like Ulanqab in Inner Mongolia, where temperatures regularly drop to -22° Celsius.”14 The next step for the Chinese tech giant is to begin relocating their current data “megacenters” from the warm maritime climate of Hangzhou to the cooler northern regions of China.

Alibaba has also tested a new form of cooling by bathing data servers in liquid; engineers soak servers in a special insulating coolant to dissipate heat without the need for mechanical refrigeration systems.15 In this fashion, a data center’s energy consumption can be reduced by more than 70 percent.16

Once the company has finalized this type of coolant technology, it plans to also relocate its data centers to rural areas. These rural locations will eliminate the need for a large labor force to manage the server rooms. The new system of cooling is advanced enough that its management can be conducted remotely from headquarters, minimizing travel and repair costs.

Despite all the benefits of migrating data centers to rural settings, they are still not the ideal solution. For one, they spoil the surrounding environment with new construction. As society continues to rapidly consume finite resources, it requires a new, radical, and more sustainable approach. We must expand beyond Earth’s atmosphere and into space.

MIGRATING TO THE FINAL FRONTIER: SPACE

For the ultimate setting for hosting data centers, we may look to the cosmos. Outer space provides the ideal freezing temperature to naturally cool data servers. The extreme atmospheric climate also allows servers to process applications faster without the risks of overheating.17 Furthermore, the zero-gravity environment enables the server drives to spin more swiftly and with less resistance.

In space, free, plentiful solar radiation could power servers addressing the energy problem.18 All these advantages— relating to extreme temperature, zero gravity, and solar radiation— add up to a space solution that would significantly reduce the level of carbon emissions from data centers. Imitating the launch of satellites, the process of sending a server into space would not be excessively costly.

ConnectX, a 2014 startup based in Los Angeles, is currently finalizing a plan to take corporations’ data out of ground centers and into the final frontier. CEO Lance Parker has been preparing to launch the “first network of small satellites and terrestrial servers”19 and it could transform the way that companies have traditionally been storing and transmitting their information.

To give a perspective of how small today’s nanosatellites can be: CubeSats, which are already being deployed frequently for research purposes, are the size of a melon and weigh less than three pounds.20 They can be launched into orbit for less than 100,000 USD, and an even smaller version, TubeSat, only costs around 8,000 USD.21

Just by eliminating past methods of IT equipment cooling, the Alibaba Group can save up to ten billion USD each year on data center electricity.22 Not only will this minimize the use of non-renewable energy but the money saved can also be allocated to other projects and technological advancements.

Prime Time To Partner Up

With their new liquid cooling technology in place and the finished construction of three new megacenters in 2020, Alibaba is at the optimal stage to invest in aerospace research and development. Furthermore, driven by the high demand for digital resources after the COVID-19 pandemic, the tech company announced a plan in 2020 to spend 28.2 billion USD on its cloud infrastructures in the upcoming years.23

Instead of proposing to “double the number of ‘super’ facilities in the near future,”24 a fraction of this new budget should be invested in a joint venture with satellite startup company ConnectX to prioritize plans of relocating these data centers into space. As for the costs of repairs and management of these orbiting data centers, Alibaba’s technology has already enabled them to operate their rural facilities with no human on-site labor force. The remote operations would be carried out in the same manner when these facilities are in outer space.

Alibaba Cloud already uses maintenance robots for 24-hour surveillance and management in these new facilities, which suggests another solution to the space operation.25 There would be minimal travel costs for manual repairs and maintenance on these satellite facilities as they can be operated directly from headquarters using robots. With Alibaba’s technological resources and ConnectX’s project plans, a transcontinental partnership would provide an innovative approach to maintaining data centers. This joint initiative will also assist in building economic and scientific bridges between the United States and China during a time of geopolitical tension.

The Limitations And Risks Of Outer Space

There remain a few limitations and risks of this proposal for big tech companies to venture into the realm of space. Given the unknown variables of outer space, sending