Sean O'Kane
Senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch with a decade of coverage of the business and technology of transportation, including Tesla and the startups chasin...
“There's no NIMBYism in space. There's not really an environmental regulator that's going to chase you down if you've got something venting off of your space data center. … Even if data centers on the ground get shut down or slowed to an unworkable timeline and the focus shifts to orbital data centers, there's a lot of lag in between now and when that actually means anything.”
Equity · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
A co-host had noted that Wall Street and regulators are both discouraging new data centers. O'Kane says that makes orbital data centers attractive on paper, but argues they won't help in the near term.
Transcript
for OpenAI because in. The spirit of making threatening things seem cute. They should 100% create like a compute campuses, like avatar QT thing and then just present that, you know, instead of, you know, a power energy sucking, water sucking data center.
…out. That there's regulators, that probably it's going to be harder to build data centers. Wall Street is probably not going to reward you for building data centers, but at the same time, to get to the scale that they want to get to, they're probably going to need to build data centers somewhere.
Yeah, look up, you know, look up in the night sky. There, you know, we've talked so much about, you know, setting aside the technical feasibility of, you know, data centers in space that the attractive qualities of it, especially for someone like Elon Musk, are that there is, you know, there's no NIMBYism in space. There are no, you know, not really kind of an environmental regulator that's going to chase you down if you've got, you know, something, something coming off venting off of your space data center. There are all these reasons why, you know, companies like SpaceX are looking at this idea or Google, which has launched its first sort of really small scale test and started it up, Project Suncatcher. And, you know, the thing is, like my point earlier about data centers maybe taking up too much of the focus of tech, the world of tech and tech executives is I think there is, listen, even if data centers on the ground get shut down or slowed to an unworkable timeline and the focus shifts to orbital data centers, sure, whatever, that there's a lot of lag in between now and when that actually means anything. And in the meantime, there's a lot coming, I…
Yeah, I mean, speaking of the near term, and just yesterday, Meta's head of platforms, Dina Powell McCormick, she was at the Wall Street Journal Tech Conference and was saying a lot of the points that Anthony Ha mentioning about it's going to be harder to get data centers. And she said something…
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I was wondering about that myself in that, you know, on some level, it feels very just like of a piece of the fact that like every tech company has been laying off, you know, some significant portion of its workforce in the last few years, you know, usually sort of connecting that in some way to…
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