Author: tio

Data centers present sprawling engineering and political problems, with ravenous appetites for land and resources. Building them on Earth has proven problematic enough — so why is everyone suddenly talking about launching them into space?

Data centers are giant warehouses for computer chips that run continuously, with up to hundreds of thousands of processors packed closely together taking up a mammoth footprint: An Indiana data center complex run by Amazon, for example, takes up more real estate than seven football stadiums. To operate nonstop, they consume immense amounts of electricity, which in turn is converted to intense heat, requiring constant cooling with fans and pumped-in water.

Fueled by the ongoing boom in artificial intelligence, Big Tech is so desperate to power its data centers that Microsoft successfully convinced the Trump administration to restart operations at the benighted Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.

The data center surge has spawned a backlash, as communities grow skeptical about their environmental toll and ultimate utility of the machine learning systems they serve.

It’s in this climate that technologists, investors, and the world’s richest humans are now talking about bypassing Earth and its logistical hurdles by putting data centers in space. And if you take at face value the words of tech barons whose wealth in no small part relies on overstating what their companies may someday achieve, they’re not just novel but inevitable. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Jeff Bezos’s space launch firm Blue Origin has been working on an orbital data center project for over a year. Elon Musk, not known for accurate predictions, has publicly committed SpaceX to putting AI data centers in orbit. “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,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently told Fox News.

The prospect of taking a trillion-dollar industry that is already experiencing a historic boom and literally shooting it toward the moon has understandably created a frenzy within a frenzy.

But large questions remain: Is it even possible? And if it is, why bother?

Orbital computing boosters claim the reason is simple: Data centers are very hot. Space, as sci-fi teaches us, is very cold. Data centers need a lot of energy, and the sun produces an effectively infinite supply of it. The thinking goes that with free ambient cooling and constant access to solar power (unlike terrestrial solar panels, these wouldn’t have to contend with Earth’s rotation or atmosphere), an orbital data center could beam its information back to our planet with few earthly downsides.

Experts who spoke to The Intercept say it’s nowhere near this simple. Despite the fact that putting small objects like satellites into orbit has become significantly cheaper than decades past, doing anything in space remains an extremely expensive and difficult enterprise compared to doing it on the ground. And even if the engineering problems are surmountable, some question the point.

There are varying visions of space data centers. Musk’s idea seems to be based on constellations of smaller satellites carrying computing hardware; others envision massive spacecraft the size of skyscrapers filled with graphics-processing units.

“If you wanted to spend enough money, you could absolutely put GPUs in space and have them do the things that data centers are supposed to do,” Matthew Buckley, a theoretical physicist at Rutgers University, told The Intercept. “The reason that I would say it is an incredibly stupid idea is that in order to make them work, you’re going to have to spend incredible amounts of money to keep them from melting. And you could solve that problem much easier by not launching them into space. And it is unclear why on earth you would want to do that.”

Outer space is largely a cold vacuum, but objects in Earth’s orbit are subjected to temperature extremes. Ali Hajimiri, an electrical engineering professor at Caltech, pushed back on the “general notion of a cold vacuum of space. Actually space can become very cold or very hot.” The International Space Station, carrying a computer payload producing a mere fraction of the heat of a large-scale data center, has to carefully contend with temperatures of between 250 and -250 degrees Fahrenheit depending on whether it’s exposed to direct sunlight. But even when an object in orbit is subjected to extreme cold temperatures, the nature of space’s vacuum behaves drastically differently than hot and cold within our atmosphere.

On Earth, you can remove a boiling kettle from the stove and the energy within will gradually transfer to the surrounding air, cooling the vessel and its contents back to room temperature. In space, there is no air, water, or other medium to which one can transfer heat, thus the coldness of space would do nothing to cool a scorching hot piece of silicon. “If you put a GPU in space and powered it, it would melt,” said Buckley.

Without ambient air or any other medium to ferry away heat through convection, a hypothetical space data center would need to rely on thermal radiation. Washington-based Starcloud is among the most prominent startups pitching orbital data centers as a concept, and says it’s working to build a 5 gigawatt space facility, a staggering figure that represents about 10 percent of all electricity currently consumed by data centers on Earth, according to a recent Goldman Sachs estimate. Starcloud says it would get rid of the astounding amount of heat generated in such a facility through the use of enormous radiators — essentially large pieces of metal that absorb the heat directly from the onboard chips and then radiates it out into space. Physics dictates that this would require radiators unlike anything that’s ever been constructed: Starcloud says it would use 16 square kilometers of radiators, taller and wider than four Burj Khalifa skyscrapers stacked end to end. How such a thing would be launched into or constructed in space, a project without any precedent, is unclear.

“If you want to create this heat transfer system, either heat pipes and all those things, those things are heavy,” Hajimiri said. “And heavy is not good for space.”

Then there’s the sun. Proponents of space data centers also point to the fact that a solar panel in space can receive uninterrupted solar energy without diminishment from weather or Earth’s atmosphere. But all of this sunlight generates extreme heat of its own, requiring further cooling. And any efficiency gained by putting the panels closer to the sun, argued Buckley, is largely negated by the extreme inefficiency of having to put them into space in the first place.

Other unsolved problems abound. While space is thought of as empty, it’s filled with radiation that can damage computer hardware or corrupt the data stored within. Earth’s orbit is also filled with debris. This orbiting space trash presents the biggest hurdle, according to John Crassidis, a mechanical and aerospace engineering professor at the University of Buffalo. Near-misses and space junk collisions are a real danger for satellites — objects a small fraction of the size of mammoth orbiting data centers. Last month, Starlink executive Michael Nicolls announced one of the company’s satellites — infinitesimal compared to Starcloud’s plan — nearly collided with a Chinese satellite. “This stuff’s going 17,500 miles per hour,” Crassidis said of space debris, and even contact with a tiny fragment could be catastrophic. “It doesn’t take too big of a hole. I think it’s half an inch radius to explode the whole [International] Space Station.”

Though Crassidis doesn’t object to companies pursuing these projects, he cautions that flooding Earth’s orbit with chip-ferrying satellites could make a dangerous situation worse. He pointed to Kessler syndrome, a theoretical scenario in which low Earth orbit becomes so crowded with objects and trash that it becomes unusable by humans.

Any floating data center would also have to contend with the difficulties of communicating between space and Earth; even Starlink’s broadband satellites are extremely slow compared to the fiber optic connections plugged into terrestrial data centers. University of Pittsburgh electrical and computer engineering department chair Alan George told The Intercept that sending data between Earth and space is just one of “many extreme challenges to overcome.” And if it can’t be solved, the whole endeavor is for naught. “Bold claims are being made based upon technologies that don’t yet exist,” he said.

“If you have hundreds of billions of dollars, you can launch enough infrastructure to keep it cool. Why would you do that when you can just put it an ugly building at the end of the block?” said Buckley. “I’m not saying that you could never do this if you just decided to set money on fire. I’m just saying I don’t understand the motivation to do this.”

The motivation may be as financial as it is scientific. SpaceX is rumored to be approaching an initial public offering that could potentially be bolstered by plans for orbiting data centers, and any Big Tech entity knows it can reap publicity and share price benefits by mentioning “AI” at any available opportunity. Space is trendy, “AI” is booming (or bubbling), and the combination of the two could spur further investment.

Starcloud co-founder and CEO Philip Johnston was unfazed by these challenges in an interview with The Intercept. He said his company’s vision of a 5-gigawatt facility is 10 to 15 years away, by which point he believes SpaceX launches will be so frequent and carry such huge payloads that bringing the raw materials to orbit shouldn’t be difficult. Johnston dismissed as “annoying” criticism of his company’s plan to cool hot chips in space. “Nothing we’re doing is against the laws of physics and nothing requires new physics to make it work. It’s not like we’re building a fusion reactor.”

In his view, it’s simply a matter of scaling up existing technology. Johnston said he doesn’t believe his company will compete with Earth-based facilities for several years, at which point he thinks Starcloud will begin launching large constellations of smaller satellites carrying computing hardware that will mesh together, rather than one giant object. This modular approach, Johnston said, will also take care of the obsolescence issue: Older hardware can simply be left to burn up upon reentering the Earth’s atmosphere. For the time being, he said the company will cater to the specialized needs like processing satellite imagery, with potential customers including the U.S. Department of War. The company counts In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the U.S. intelligence community, among its backers. Johnston told The Intercept that the “CIA is interested in what we’re doing,” but declined to comment further.

Experts who spoke with The Intercept didn’t wholly oppose these projects because the sheer enormity of the challenge could yield engineering breakthroughs. But many also suggested that the mammoth investment in resources and ingenuity required would be better spent on the surface.

Hajimiri says he believes the engineering problems could be solved eventually, and that crazy ideas can yield scientific and societal benefits. A decade ago, he pursued a similar project on a far smaller scale. He and his team dropped it for simple reason: Chips need to be replaced. The processors used to train state-of-the-art large language models are rendered obsolete in a matter of years. It’s this need for newer and better chips that has taken the value of chipmakers like Nvidia into the stratosphere. But it’s not just buying the latest and greatest. Things go wrong: Processors sometimes fail, power supplies burn out, wiring needs to be fixed. In earthly data centers, the solution is easy. Technicians use their hands to pop in a replacement processor, for example.

“Data centers need full-time humans to deal with the occasional hardware emergencies,” said Dimitrios Nikolopoulos, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech who works on high-performance computing. “And I don’t know how this is gonna be dealt with in space.” Johnston predicted that robot repairmen would eventually solve this problem.

When an orbital data center’s hardware grows obsolete, companies would need to figure out how to upgrade them. Otherwise it becomes a piece of space trash two-and-a-half miles across.

Jesse Jenkins, an engineering professor at Princeton who works on energy technologies, said the tech world is simply looking in the wrong place. “The fact that we are considering building data centers in space because it’s too hard to build and power them on land should be an indictment of our ability to deploy new energy and data infrastructure at scale in the United States.”

The biggest problem is the simplest, said veteran aerospace engineer Andrew McCalip. Though the cost of putting things in space has decreased dramatically, it’s still vastly greater than building a data center on land. “Can we host a GPU in space cheaper than hosting it in a building in Oregon?” he asked. The answer remains an emphatic no.

McCalip is also skeptical of Johnston’s claim that Starcloud represents a green alternative to terrestrial data centers. Launching craft large enough and frequently enough to make orbital data centers feasible would require infeasibly vast volumes of liquid oxygen fuel, McCalip said, and manufacturing enough to match the ambitions of SpaceX (and other companies hoping to hitch a ride to orbit) would likely entail burning a lot of fossil fuels.

It’s enough to make you ask once more: Why do all of this in space?

“The benefit,” McCalip said, “would be this sort of vague ‘Humanity gets better at doing things in space.’”

Correction: January 15, 2026
Due to an editing error, a quote was misattributed. “If you have hundreds of billions of dollars, you can launch enough infrastructure to keep it cool. Why would you do that when you can just put it an ugly building at the end of the block?” was said by Matthew Buckley, not Alan George.

The post Why Is Everyone Suddenly Talking About Putting Data Centers in Space? appeared first on The Intercept.

Our first story of 2026 revealed how a destructive new botnet called Kimwolf has infected more than two million devices by mass-compromising a vast number of unofficial Android TV streaming boxes. Today, we’ll dig through digital clues left behind by the hackers, network operators and services that appear to have benefitted from Kimwolf’s spread.

On Dec. 17, 2025, the Chinese security firm XLab published a deep dive on Kimwolf, which forces infected devices to participate in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and to relay abusive and malicious Internet traffic for so-called “residential proxy” services.

The software that turns one’s device into a residential proxy is often quietly bundled with mobile apps and games. Kimwolf specifically targeted residential proxy software that is factory installed on more than a thousand different models of unsanctioned Android TV streaming devices. Very quickly, the residential proxy’s Internet address starts funneling traffic that is linked to ad fraud, account takeover attempts and mass content scraping.

The XLab report explained its researchers found “definitive evidence” that the same cybercriminal actors and infrastructure were used to deploy both Kimwolf and the Aisuru botnet — an earlier version of Kimwolf that also enslaved devices for use in DDoS attacks and proxy services.

XLab said it suspected since October that Kimwolf and Aisuru had the same author(s) and operators, based in part on shared code changes over time. But it said those suspicions were confirmed on December 8 when it witnessed both botnet strains being distributed by the same Internet address at 93.95.112[.]59.

RESI RACK

Public records show the Internet address range flagged by XLab is assigned to Lehi, Utah-based Resi Rack LLC. Resi Rack’s website bills the company as a “Premium Game Server Hosting Provider.” Meanwhile, Resi Rack’s ads on the Internet moneymaking forum BlackHatWorld refer to it as a “Premium Residential Proxy Hosting and Proxy Software Solutions Company.”

Resi Rack co-founder Cassidy Hales told KrebsOnSecurity his company received a notification on December 10 about Kimwolf using their network “that detailed what was being done by one of our customers leasing our servers.”

“When we received this email we took care of this issue immediately,” Hales wrote in response to an email requesting comment. “This is something we are very disappointed is now associated with our name and this was not the intention of our company whatsoever.”

The Resi Rack Internet address cited by XLab on December 8 came onto KrebsOnSecurity’s radar more than two weeks before that. Benjamin Brundage is founder of Synthient, a startup that tracks proxy services. In late October 2025, Brundage shared that the people selling various proxy services which benefitted from the Aisuru and Kimwolf botnets were doing so at a new Discord server called resi[.]to.

On November 24, 2025, a member of the resi-dot-to Discord channel shares an IP address responsible for proxying traffic over Android TV streaming boxes infected by the Kimwolf botnet.

When KrebsOnSecurity joined the resi[.]to Discord channel in late October as a silent lurker, the server had fewer than 150 members, including “Shox” — the nickname used by Resi Rack’s co-founder Mr. Hales — and his business partner “Linus,” who did not respond to requests for comment.

Other members of the resi[.]to Discord channel would periodically post new IP addresses that were responsible for proxying traffic over the Kimwolf botnet. As the screenshot from resi[.]to above shows, that Resi Rack Internet address flagged by XLab was used by Kimwolf to direct proxy traffic as far back as November 24, if not earlier. All told, Synthient said it tracked at least seven static Resi Rack IP addresses connected to Kimwolf proxy infrastructure between October and December 2025.

Neither of Resi Rack’s co-owners responded to follow-up questions. Both have been active in selling proxy services via Discord for nearly two years. According to a review of Discord messages indexed by the cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint, Shox and Linus spent much of 2024 selling static “ISP proxies” by routing various Internet address blocks at major U.S. Internet service providers.

In February 2025, AT&T announced that effective July 31, 2025, it would no longer originate routes for network blocks that are not owned and managed by AT&T (other major ISPs have since made similar moves). Less than a month later, Shox and Linus told customers they would soon cease offering static ISP proxies as a result of these policy changes.

Shox and Linux, talking about their decision to stop selling ISP proxies.

DORT & SNOW

The stated owner of the resi[.]to Discord server went by the abbreviated username “D.” That initial appears to be short for the hacker handle “Dort,” a name that was invoked frequently throughout these Discord chats.

Dort’s profile on resi dot to.

This “Dort” nickname came up in KrebsOnSecurity’s recent conversations with “Forky,” a Brazilian man who acknowledged being involved in the marketing of the Aisuru botnet at its inception in late 2024. But Forky vehemently denied having anything to do with a series of massive and record-smashing DDoS attacks in the latter half of 2025 that were blamed on Aisuru, saying the botnet by that point had been taken over by rivals.

Forky asserts that Dort is a resident of Canada and one of at least two individuals currently in control of the Aisuru/Kimwolf botnet. The other individual Forky named as an Aisuru/Kimwolf botmaster goes by the nickname “Snow.”

On January 2 — just hours after our story on Kimwolf was published — the historical chat records on resi[.]to were erased without warning and replaced by a profanity-laced message for Synthient’s founder. Minutes after that, the entire server disappeared.

Later that same day, several of the more active members of the now-defunct resi[.]to Discord server moved to a Telegram channel where they posted Brundage’s personal information, and generally complained about being unable to find reliable “bulletproof” hosting for their botnet.

Hilariously, a user by the name “Richard Remington” briefly appeared in the group’s Telegram server to post a crude “Happy New Year” sketch that claims Dort and Snow are now in control of 3.5 million devices infected by Aisuru and/or Kimwolf. Richard Remington’s Telegram account has since been deleted, but it previously stated its owner operates a website that caters to DDoS-for-hire or “stresser” services seeking to test their firepower.

BYTECONNECT, PLAINPROXIES, AND 3XK TECH

Reports from both Synthient and XLab found that Kimwolf was used to deploy programs that turned infected systems into Internet traffic relays for multiple residential proxy services. Among those was a component that installed a software development kit (SDK) called ByteConnect, which is distributed by a provider known as Plainproxies.

ByteConnect says it specializes in “monetizing apps ethically and free,” while Plainproxies advertises the ability to provide content scraping companies with “unlimited” proxy pools. However, Synthient said that upon connecting to ByteConnect’s SDK they instead observed a mass influx of credential-stuffing attacks targeting email servers and popular online websites.

A search on LinkedIn finds the CEO of Plainproxies is Friedrich Kraft, whose resume says he is co-founder of ByteConnect Ltd. Public Internet routing records show Mr. Kraft also operates a hosting firm in Germany called 3XK Tech GmbH. Mr. Kraft did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.

In July 2025, Cloudflare reported that 3XK Tech (a.k.a. Drei-K-Tech) had become the Internet’s largest source of application-layer DDoS attacks. In November 2025, the security firm GreyNoise Intelligence found that Internet addresses on 3XK Tech were responsible for roughly three-quarters of the Internet scanning being done at the time for a newly discovered and critical vulnerability in security products made by Palo Alto Networks.

Source: Cloudflare’s Q2 2025 DDoS threat report.

LinkedIn has a profile for another Plainproxies employee, Julia Levi, who is listed as co-founder of ByteConnect. Ms. Levi did not respond to requests for comment. Her resume says she previously worked for two major proxy providers: Netnut Proxy Network, and Bright Data.

Synthient likewise said Plainproxies ignored their outreach, noting that the Byteconnect SDK continues to remain active on devices compromised by Kimwolf.

A post from the LinkedIn page of Plainproxies Chief Revenue Officer Julia Levi, explaining how the residential proxy business works.

MASKIFY

Synthient’s January 2 report said another proxy provider heavily involved in the sale of Kimwolf proxies was Maskify, which currently advertises on multiple cybercrime forums that it has more than six million residential Internet addresses for rent.

Maskify prices its service at a rate of 30 cents per gigabyte of data relayed through their proxies. According to Synthient, that price range is insanely low and is far cheaper than any other proxy provider in business today.

“Synthient’s Research Team received screenshots from other proxy providers showing key Kimwolf actors attempting to offload proxy bandwidth in exchange for upfront cash,” the Synthient report noted. “This approach likely helped fuel early development, with associated members spending earnings on infrastructure and outsourced development tasks. Please note that resellers know precisely what they are selling; proxies at these prices are not ethically sourced.”

Maskify did not respond to requests for comment.

The Maskify website. Image: Synthient.

BOTMASTERS LASH OUT

Hours after our first Kimwolf story was published last week, the resi[.]to Discord server vanished, Synthient’s website was hit with a DDoS attack, and the Kimwolf botmasters took to doxing Brundage via their botnet.

The harassing messages appeared as text records uploaded to the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), a distributed system for supporting smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. As documented by XLab, in mid-December the Kimwolf operators upgraded their infrastructure and began using ENS to better withstand the near-constant takedown efforts targeting the botnet’s control servers.

An ENS record used by the Kimwolf operators taunts security firms trying to take down the botnet’s control servers. Image: XLab.

By telling infected systems to seek out the Kimwolf control servers via ENS, even if the servers that the botmasters use to control the botnet are taken down the attacker only needs to update the ENS text record to reflect the new Internet address of the control server, and the infected devices will immediately know where to look for further instructions.

“This channel itself relies on the decentralized nature of blockchain, unregulated by Ethereum or other blockchain operators, and cannot be blocked,” XLab wrote.

The text records included in Kimwolf’s ENS instructions can also feature short messages, such as those that carried Brundage’s personal information. Other ENS text records associated with Kimwolf offered some sage advice: “If flagged, we encourage the TV box to be destroyed.”

An ENS record tied to the Kimwolf botnet advises, “If flagged, we encourage the TV box to be destroyed.”

Both Synthient and XLabs say Kimwolf targets a vast number of Android TV streaming box models, all of which have zero security protections, and many of which ship with proxy malware built in. Generally speaking, if you can send a data packet to one of these devices you can also seize administrative control over it.

If you own a TV box that matches one of these model names and/or numbers, please just rip it out of your network. If you encounter one of these devices on the network of a family member or friend, send them a link to this story (or to our January 2 story on Kimwolf) and explain that it’s not worth the potential hassle and harm created by keeping them plugged in.