SpaceX wants to put 1 million AI satellites in orbit. What would that do to Earth's climate?

Concentrations of dangerous pollutants from rocket launches and satellite reentries in Earth's upper atmosphere might reach treacherous tipping points if constellations of hundreds of thousands of orbiting data centers get deployed in the next decade, experts say.

There's no question that Earth has an AI data center problem.

By 2030, AI data centers may be responsible for up to 17% of electricity consumption in the U.S., according to a forecast by the Electric Power Research Institute.

New fossil fuel power plants are being built to feed the growing demand for electricity, and aging ones are kept online despite decarbonization plans.

On top of that, huge amounts of water are taken from already strained reservoirs to cool the computers.

Companies such as SpaceX , Amazon and Blue Origin say they have a solution: moving the power-hungry data crunching infrastructure into space, where solar power is easy to produce, and heat can be radiated out into the frigid vacuum.

Combined, those companies have filed applications to the U.S.

Federal Communications Commission to launch more than a million orbiting data centers in the next 10 years.

Most of those will belong to SpaceX, if all goes to plan; Elon Musk has said the company wants to operate a million-satellite AI constellation all by itself.

The plans are making atmospheric scientists tear their hair out.

If all these projects come to fruition, the number of satellites being launched to space and reentering the atmosphere will increase 100 times compared to today's numbers.

Moreover, the data center satellites will be much larger than the spacecraft orbiting Earth today.

This large mass will translate into higher quantities of polluting propellant needed to loft these systems off Earth and a much larger amount of metals vaporizing in Earth's atmosphere during reentry.

Neither is good news for our planet's air.