The answer to tech’s clean energy problem? Put data centres in space

Mark Zuckerberg made waves last month when Meta announced an audacious plan to fund the construction of a fleet of nuclear reactors to power its data centres. A few months before, Microsoft’s boss, Satya Nadella, had said that the $3 trillion tech giant would revive a reactor at the defunct Three Mile Island nuclear power station in Pennsylvania, as part of its effort to find the clean, cheap electricity required to run its artificial intelligence models.

Philip Johnston has a better idea. The 38-year-old entrepreneur, from Elstead in Surrey, said they should put their power plants — and data centres — in space.

Johnston runs a start-up called Lumen Orbit, based in Redmond, Washington, which last month raised $11 million (£9 million) to become the