With roughly half of planned U.S. data center buildouts this year expected to be delayed or canceled amid mounting power constraints and local opposition, tech bros are increasingly looking beyond Earth and toward space for the next phase of compute expansion.

This dovetails with one of our most investable themes,"Data Centers In Space Are Coming: Here's How To Profit,"in which we outlined how SpaceX, leveraging Starship's affordable launch costs and the Starlink network, could make it commercially viable to deploy spacecraft packed with chip stacks and build out a massive mesh network of orbital compute satellites.

Moments ago,The Wall Street Journalreported that Google is in discussions with Elon Musk's SpaceX as a key launch provider for orbital data center deployments.

WSJ: Google is in talks with SpaceX for a rocket launch deal as the search giant expands its own efforts to put orbital data centers in space.The speculative technology has been at the center of SpaceX’s pitch to investors ahead of its planned public listing this summerA…https://t.co/eg9yE3J1Uz

The discussions center on potential Starship launches for Google's Project Suncatcher, which aims to test satellite-based computing hardware by 2027, the outlet reported, citing sources.

"We'll send tiny racks of machines and have them in satellites, test them out, and then start scaling from there," Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Fox News in a recent interview.

Pichai noted, "There's no doubt to me that a decade or so away, we'll be viewing it as a more normal way to build data centers."

With the SpaceX IPO scheduled for June and commanding a valuation between $1.25 trillion and $1.75 trillion, we recently outlined for readers exactly how to profit from the commercialization of space. Read morehere.

The urgency for orbital data center deployments comes as Canaccord Genuity analyst George Gianarikaswarnedin mid-April that "the American data center boom is hitting a formidable wall of logistical friction."

Gianarikas is referring to the latest outlook by Sightline Climate, which is also reinforced by recent articles from Bloomberg and others, and reveals a sobering reality for 2026: nearly half of the nation's planned 16-gigawatt capacity faces cancellation or delay, with only 5 gigawatts currently under construction.

Source: ZeroHedge News