Astronomers warn SpaceX's plan for 1 million orbital AI data centers could ruin the night sky

The AI boom's appetite for compute is now reaching literally into orbit, since SpaceX has explicitly pitched more than a million of its planned satellites as data centers powering the AI buildout rather than just internet relays. What is striking is that the threat is not from one company's ambition but from several competing orbital data center and satellite plans stacking on top of each other, none of which alone looks catastrophic. Astronomers are proposing a hard cap before the damage is done, which is a rare case of a science community trying to set the rules before the infrastructure exists rather than after.