"Tech leaders" are lying.
[Ignorance and stupidity are no longer valid excuses.]
The most charitable read is that this is a marketing stunt for Google, which they expect to generate a bunch of mostly sympathetic press coverage in venues like (spitballing here) the New York Times.
@kateconger.comNext week, Google is putting an experimental satellite into orbit that is the first step towards building A.I. data centers in space. This technology is all still very speculative, but tech leaders are increasingly adamant that this is the future of compute. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/t...
nytimes.com
Google Is Sending an A.I. Data Center to Outer Space (Gift Article)
Next Thursday, Google is sending an experimental satellite into orbit that will have enough computing power to answer simple A.I. queries from space.