Paul Moss

Jonathan Head.

There were a few people scratching their heads when Elon Musk announced he was merging two of his companies.

XAI is the artificial intelligence wing of his corporate empire, while SpaceX, of course, focuses on space rockets.

So what's the connection?

Well, it seems Mr Musk wants to take the data centres used for AI and send them into orbit, where he believes they can be powered by the unfiltered energy of the sun.

Science fiction?

Not at all, the tech billionaire insisted.

It's a development that's just round the corner.

should be said that Elon Musk's plans for space have often been dismissed, only for some of them at least to materialise just the way he promised.

And yet this latest plan has met with particular scepticism.

Among the doubters is Adam Michael Becker, an American astrophysicist who spoke to my colleague James Kumarasamy.

There are a lot of reasons why data centers in space make absolutely no sense.

And at the top of that list is a very basic fact about space, which is that the best insulator is a vacuum.

So putting a data center in space is like putting a giant blanket around it.

And data centers need to be kept nice and cool.

Elon Musk's answer to that, certainly when he was speaking at the World Economic Forum, is that you have a radiator pointed away from the sun.

It would be massive.

And that's going to be extraordinarily difficult to deploy in space for just one data center, much less, you know, a lot of them.

There are also many other problems.

For example, the radiation levels are much higher in space.