The Treasury Department proposed the change Thursday. If finalized, the rule would take effect after May 2027, aiming to end race-based student policies or programs.
© Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times
During a tense vote on a data center being built in her drought-stricken Arizona district last summer, Tucson City Councilmember Nikki Lee made an unlikely pitch: “We’re going to get a little out-of-this-world for a second, so just bear with me.”
Like many of her constituents, Lee did not want Project Blue, a sprawling 290-acre data center, gobbling up an ounce of her local drinking water. “We need to put data centers where they belong,” she said, and “we don’t think data centers belong in the desert.”
President Donald Trump’s recent bluster aside, it’s possible that the only thing as bipartisan as loving Dolly Parton is hating data centers, whose construction has become so controversial, so costly, and so backlogged here on Earth that companies like Google, Meta, and of course, SpaceX, are actively flirting with the idea of flinging them into orbit instead. Soon after the Tucson City Council rejected Project Blue’s attempt to connect to city utilities, Amazon Web Services, the secretive intended beneficiary, pulled out of the project, and another Jeff Bezos company, Blue Origin, filed a plan with regulators for tens of thousands of possible new data centers, this time, destined for orbit.
Sure, launching a hyperscale AI data center into space is still unprecedented engineering-wise, carries an unfathomably large price tag, could engender its own severe environmental risks, and may or may not draw unwelcome attention from the hunters among the stars. But for AI companies, such trade-offs might still be preferable to the terrestrial roadblocks, among them an explosive populist backlash and a 12-year wait to connect to the power grid.
Next Thursday, Google plans to launch a pilot satellite capable of processing basic AI queries into orbit, the most significant test yet in what’s become a burgeoning race to power AI from space. For now, the satellite won’t approach the levels of computing power at a hulking terrestrial data center like Project Blue. But it is a major step toward a future in which many or even most of our AI queries will be powered not from the outskirts of a city like Tucson, but from a blinking data center circling the skies.
SpaceX’s gargantuan initial public offering earlier this summer was predicated on the idea that it would launch a thus-far-unrealized fleet of orbital data centers to fuel much of the AI economy. The company — whose rockets Google will use to launch its pilot — claims that by the end of this decade, possibly as early as 2028, it will have successfully assembled an AI data center in orbit, with plans to eventually harvest a staggering 100 gigawatts of new solar energy for AI annually, equivalent to one-fifth of all US electricity consumption last year. (As always, that’s a very iffy promise.)
Still, as Google’s overtures clearly demonstrate, it’s no longer a question of if large-scale space-based data centers could be technically feasible, but rather when they’ll be ready to launch, and perhaps more importantly, whether the math of using them to power something like AI will make much financial sense anytime soon. As of now, building a one-gigawatt data center in space would cost about $51.5 billion, according to an analysis by aerospace engineer Andrew McCalip, compared with $16 billion for one on land.
“They’re not breaking any rules of physics. Yes, there are going to be engineering challenges, but they are all solvable with enough time and money,” said Jason Aspiotis, a leading space systems engineer who now leads an orbital data center startup. “The gray area is, well, what about the economics?”
But even if this astronomically kooky plan does take off, it may not change much for those of us left on terra firma: Our energy bills will remain high, even if data centers aren’t there to drive them up. Our earthly infrastructure — affordable housing, public transit, and more — may be just as hard to build as ever. Harder even, maybe, given that crucial resources and untapped tax revenue will be literally rocketing up out of our reach.
No, if these tech giants succeed, it will not fix what’s wrong here on Earth, but merely prove once again their exemption to the gravitational forces holding the rest of us down.
My father spent most of his career working in the satellite industry, and would sometimes let me waltz inside the quaint little data center housed in his office, a room I remember as roughly the size of my school’s computer lab, hosting rows upon rows of servers that I couldn’t touch, churning with a cool, mechanical hum as they crunched zeroes and ones.
AI data centers work similarly to that server room but on an exponentially larger scale, requiring far more land and energy to run, and much more extravagant cooling systems. Sending his office’s data center into orbit would have been extraordinarily difficult, and getting one of the facilities that powers modern LLMs aloft would be an even larger, more ambitious undertaking. But the benefits — namely, “cheap space (no pun intended) and power,” as my dad put it to me recently — are even more enticing.
An orbital data center need not negotiate with an elected official like Lee over precious water rights to the Colorado River, though it would need to install bigger-than-football-field-sized heat radiators to keep itself cool. You can’t simply launch something that big into orbit, meaning a space-based hyperscale data center — the size of which would likely rival that of the International Space Station — would need to be assembled piece by piece, probably by robots. And while the sun would provide an endless supply of solar power to process your ChatGPT queries, it would also inflict incessant radiation on delicate circuitry. If something breaks, you can’t send a technician up to fix it. Many experts are also concerned that if an excess of space junk, which extraterrestrial data centers would inevitably produce, begins colliding like bumper cars in Earth’s low orbit, it could knock out the orbital infrastructure we already rely on, like GPS navigation and weather satellites.
Even plastic decays in space, said Sven Bilén, a professor of aerospace engineering at Penn State, who, like Aspiotis, believes that early orbital data centers will probably be “processing data from space, like spatial imaging satellites or weather satellites, as opposed to, you know, cat videos” or AI-generated reality TV slop.
But even if AI is not the lowest-hanging fruit for deploying compute into space, it is certainly the deepest-pocketed, meaning that many investors and companies like SpaceX and Google seem quite willing to shoulder the start-up costs anyway. And considering how difficult it’s gotten to build data centers on Earth, or at least in the United States, it’s indeed possible that space could become the cheaper, or at least most convenient option, more quickly than one might think.
“In some form or another, in five years, we are going to have some orbital data centers in space for sure,” Krishna Muralidharan, who leads the Center for Semiconductor Manufacturing at the University of Arizona, told me, but it’s hard to say right now whether those consist of just a few expensive prototypes, or the beginning of a much bigger swing toward orbital compute. “Only time will tell whether you’re going to have a business case for it.”
So, is it better to have a data center in space or in your backyard?
David Reid, a member of Virginia’s House of Delegates representing Loudoun County, home to more data centers than anywhere else on Earth, says the question has repeatedly come up at his town hall meetings. Reid is the rare politician — apart from the president, anyway — willing to defend terrestrial data centers, calling them a “money-printing machine” for local schools and infrastructure. Having spent decades working in the defense and technology sectors, he is doubtful that the math on orbital data centers will ever make sense.
“I believe this is, for lack of a better term, fictional nonsense,” he said, and is “creating a distraction from the fact that local officials here on Earth still need to make better zoning decisions.”
If most of the AI industry can eventually be powered by space, as SpaceX claims, it will require millions of sprawling new satellites, in an orbit currently dotted by fewer than 20,000 of them. Though “space is really big,” as Elon Musk has put it, one million satellites would still profoundly and, likely irrevocably, transform our night sky into one in which data centers outnumber visible stars.
“Will humanity notice if there are fewer stars in the sky? Well, not so much right now,” given light pollution in many cities, said John Barentine, an astronomer and environmental advocate for the night sky. “But what if they’re replaced by these artificial stars in the night sky? Is that the point at which people will say, ‘Wait a minute, we don’t want this. We want the benefits, but we don’t want this as a consequence.’”
This is, of course, the tension also at the heart of building data centers here on Earth. To some extent, they’re the most tangible representations of how little power we have to shape the course of a transformative new technology that few trust, and even fewer asked for. It’s one thing to object to a hulking data center, but it might be another altogether to see the sigils of our digital overlords illuminating the firmament. Would a place like Tucson, one of the most beautiful places to stargaze in the world, prefer a Project Blue to a starscape marred by blinking servers in the sky?
Update, September 24, 10:35 am ET: This post was originally published on September 3 and has been updated to include information about a pilot satellite capable of processing basic AI queries that Google is launching soon.
Gloria Steinem, who urged women to pursue self-affirmation, political power and equality both in the workplace and at home, has died.
This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.
Every day it seems scientists are making breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s disease.
New treatments that actually slow the disease’s progression — lecanemab and donanemab — have finally appeared on pharmacy shelves in the past few years, delivering real-world results for patients and their families. New blood tests promise to identify at-risk patients earlier in their lives, giving them the chance to make lifestyle changes and potentially start treatment to stave off symptoms.
The media and wellness influencers are always reporting on new diets, workouts, or hobbies that can combat dementia. Just last month, there was even a report out of China about an experimental brain surgery that allegedly reverses the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease — the Holy Grail that researchers have been pursuing for generations.
But hype has outpaced the science of treating Alzheimer’s disease before. Promising treatments have gotten a lot of attention before only to fizzle out a short time later. Less than a decade ago, many scientists were wondering whether we had the theory of Alzheimer’s disease completely wrong.
For those of us who don’t work in the field, that confusing history can make it hard to make sense of these recent developments. It sounds like we are entering a new age for Alzheimer’s prevention and treatment — but are we actually? And, if we are, how can people benefit from it?
I called a couple of leading experts to find out.
Here’s the good news: They say scientists are genuinely shifting the paradigm for treating, detecting, and ultimately preventing Alzheimer’s disease. The two drugs on the market can actually slow down cognitive decline for many patients, something that had been out of reach for decades. And more treatments are coming.
“Diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s has changed in a way that is revolutionary compared to, say, four or five years ago,” said Dr. Jason Karlawish, co-director of the Penn Memory Center.
At the clinic where he sees patients, “people are feeling a sense of hope and promise,” he said.
For a long time, the science on Alzheimer’s disease felt stuck. Now it’s moving. There’s only one thing that could stop it, according to experts: the Trump administration’s anti-science agenda.
In 2023, the approval of two drugs transformed the landscape of Alzheimer’s care: lecanemab (sold as Leqembi) and donanemab (sold as Kisunla), two IV treatments that target amyloid plaque in the brain of a person with Alzheimer’s. Before these two drugs — and the approval of aducanemab, a similar but less effective and riskier treatment — it had been decades since the last new Alzheimer’s treatment had come onto the market.
They are not perfect treatments. They are effective only for people with mild cognitive impairment, not more advanced stages of the disease. They can only slow the progression of Alzheimer’s for those people, not stop or reverse it. And they do come with the risk of serious side effects, particularly brain bleeds.
“The good news is, we have these two drugs that can help people,” said Tara Spires-Jones, professor of neurodegeneration at the University of Edinburgh and author of the forthcoming book, Fighting for our Minds: The Neuroscience of Defeating Dementia. “The bad news is, you don’t get any better. You’re still getting worse — you just get worse more slowly.”
These drugs are a start, not the endpoint. Researchers are already working on the next generation of treatments. The drug pipeline is becoming more robust because scientists are finally coalescing around a theory of the disease that’s more complex — and, crucially, opens more potential targets for new drugs.
For a long time, Alzheimer’s research was dominated by the amyloid hypothesis. The theory posited that the buildup of plaque made from amyloid proteins was responsible for disrupting brain signals and creating the telltale loss of memory and identity associated with Alzheimer’s. Scientists are still confident that amyloid plays a role in Alzheimer’s — and the success of these amyloid-targeting drugs supports that interpretation. But there is also a stronger consensus that other mechanisms must be at work. Some people who have evidence of amyloid plaque building up in their brain nonetheless never develop Alzheimer’s disease.
Another type of protein called tau seems to be associated with the disease. Scientists also increasingly believe that inflammation may play a role. Part of the breakthrough of the past few years is that scientists are no longer arguing about whether they even understand this disease at all. Instead, the mission is to pursue different drug targets and increase the chances of delivering new treatments.
“I don’t think people in the field are fighting over, ‘Your mechanism is wrong and mine is right,’” Karlawish said. “I think there’s a kind of general democratization. There are multiple promising mechanisms.”
New tau-targeting treatments are moving through clinical trials. Biogen has a drug called diranersen that aims to stop the production of the tau proteins moving through clinical trials. Preliminary results showed that the drug did appear to reduce tau and improve cognitive symptoms — although, curiously, the most effective response was at the lowest dose. Further research is needed before the drug could receive FDA approval. Another tau-targeting drug from Eisai has also entered clinical trials and is in the earlier safety-check phases. And new amyloid-targeting treatments aim to better penetrate the brain-blood barrier and deliver more effective relief for patients.
In the short term, scientists hope these drugs can slow or even stop cognitive decline better than the currently approved medications. In the longer term, these new approaches — and potentially a combination of different drugs with different targets — could eventually allow scientists to reverse Alzheimer’s. (As for that experimental surgery in China, as Nature reported, scientists say its results will need to be replicated in other clinical trials before we’re confident that it really works.)
“The brain is amazing. You can make new synapses,” Spires-Jones said. “If we could stop the insult, it’s theoretically possible in the future that we could have treatments that not only slow the progression but actually let you get better. But I think we’re pretty far from those. What I think is much closer is really, really meaningful treatments that will slow or even stop disease progression. We’re probably going to see something coming out in the next couple of years.”
But even a “cure” in the long term will be conditional. Because Alzheimer’s eventually causes the brain to die (thus its 100 percent fatality rate), there may still be a point of no return once the disease is too entrenched. “A cure for people in the late stages is practically impossible because too much of the brain has died,” Spires-Jones said.
And that reality makes early detection all the more important. That’s the way patients can get the most out of the current medications and their eventual successors.
It used to be that doctors couldn’t confirm whether somebody had Alzheimer’s disease until the person died and they could perform an autopsy. But the new treatments can give people more time with their loved ones before the disease’s worst symptoms kick in.
That means waiting is not an option. Patients are demanding better methods of detection.
“Treatment attracts patients, for good reason, and treatment demands diagnosis,” Karlawish said. “Treatment really does drive the business model for a disease.”
So, scientists are designing new blood tests that can detect the presence of tau proteins and predict the later onset of Alzheimer’s disease with impressive accuracy. And they are learning more about pivotal periods in a person’s life where their risk of Alzheimer’s might start to grow — and when interventions might therefore be more effective. New research has suggested that menopause may be an accelerant for Alzheimer’s progression, and therefore may represent an important point in someone’s life.
These developments are shaping what the near-term future of Alzheimer’s care will look like. As a person ages, they will be able to take one of these blood tests to see if there are signals they are at a higher risk of the disease. If they are, they will have a growing number of medications that they could take to delay or potentially prevent dementia from setting in. For a woman at risk, for example, hormone replacement therapy has been associated with a reduced risk of dementia. Clinical trials are also underway to test whether existing drugs like donanemab and lecanemab can delay the onset of symptoms for somebody who is at higher risk but has not yet started to experience cognitive decline.
“We couldn’t get the right people at the right time early on — and now we can,” Spires-Jones said. “That’s a problem that’s almost solved now.”
Prevention may also be where GLP-1 drugs ultimately prove most useful. As scientists come to better understand the intimate relationship between vascular health and brain health, there is growing reason to think these medicines could help reduce dementia risk decades before symptoms appear.
That would make GLP-1s a complement to drugs such as lecanemab and donanemab, rather than a competitor. Those treatments are designed for people who already have early-stage Alzheimer’s. GLP-1s, by contrast, have so far shown little ability to slow the disease once cognitive decline has begun. In a disappointing clinical trial involving people with mild cognitive impairment or early Alzheimer’s, researchers found that the drugs had a negligible effect on the progression of the disease.
But that result doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for Ozempic and the next generation of GLP-1 drugs in the fight against Alzheimer’s.
Scientists increasingly believe that chronic inflammation, obesity, and poor vascular health can all accelerate cognitive aging. GLP-1 drugs reduce inflammation, while their effects on weight and metabolic health can substantially lower cardiovascular risk. If US obesity rates continue to fall as these medicines become more widely used, their most consequential effect on Alzheimer’s may therefore be indirect: improving the health of millions of people long before the disease takes hold.
“I think where we’re going in the future is those semaglutide-type drugs will probably be very good for prevention,” Spires-Jones said. “If we can keep people’s obesity in check, that will probably more likely be a preventative treatment. That trial pretty conclusively told us that once you have symptoms, at least, that drug is not going to help.”
This summer, the Alzheimer’s Association announced a $100 million research project to examine whether lifestyle changes plus a GLP-1 medication could reduce the risk of dementia in at-risk older adults.
If you’re worried about your own cognitive health or that of a loved one, you have options, and those options are only going to grow. Talk to your doctor. There are FDA-approved blood tests you can already take. Ask about lecanemab and donanemab. You may also be a good candidate to help scientists in the most active areas of development. Researchers need people to participate in their clinical trials. The Alzheimer’s Association and the federal government have online tools to help people find clinical trials that you or someone you love could be a candidate for.
All the optimism about the future of Alzheimer’s treatment is based on research and clinical trials. When I asked Karlawish and Spires-Jones about where the story goes from here, they shared one concern: that science becomes so politicized that it would be difficult to get grant funding for research projects that could lead to additional breakthroughs.
“In some sense, the biggest threat is outside the science,” Karlawish said. “There’s deep concern that this politicization of the grant process will essentially wreck American science. We can’t sustain that kind of environment and still demand the results that we’ve come to expect.”
President Donald Trump and US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. like to present their crusade to reform American science as being targeted at frivolous DEI projects. But there are already examples of serious dementia studies being affected: Last month, the Trump administration canceled $15 million in grants for studies to evaluate how discrimination affects long-term brain health.
This is another place where we have more agency to impact what happens next: the ballot box. Use your individual political power to support lawmakers who defend the scientists and researchers doing critical work.
“You can vote for people who will fund and support science as an endeavor,” Spires-Jones said. “Advances in science don’t happen on their own. We need all of society to get involved.”
Michael Shvartsman provided funding for the documentary 'The Man You Don't Know' and attended its Mar-a-Lago premiere in hopes of winning a pardon, according to a lawsuit by an L.A. studio alleging threats and extortion.
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