UAE’s Madari wants to host your data — in space

Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) recent shutdown triggered massive disruption.

Thousands of websites, apps, and services— especially in e-commerce, finance, gaming, and education — went offline. The fallout: outages, financial hits, and logistical chaos like flight delays.

This exposed a critical problem — and a huge opportunity. Enter space-based data centres.

It's the next frontier for resilient, fast, and global cloud infrastructure.

But how is it even possible to have a lightning-fast cloud services in space?

If you think about the International Space Station (ISS), it’s not just a lab. For decades, it’s also been working as a data and communications centre, though a very expensive one (estimated at $200+ billion over 20 years), bankrolled by multiple countries.

Now, privately-funded space-based data centres are set to revolutionise cloud computing by delivering faster, resilient, and eco-friendly services beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

Space-based data centres promise enhanced global coverage by operating directly in orbit, leveraging solar power and advanced cooling to overcome Earth constraints.

The rapid growth of digital data on the ground presents a critical challenge.

Conventional data centres are very energy-intensive and environmentally harmful, even as the world’s reliance on data continues to spike exponentially. 

Madari Space CEO Sharif Al Romaithi pointed to another challenge.

"By 2035, we expect or forecast data to exceed 23,500 petabytes, by sources such as Earth observation satellites and others," he told Bloomberg.

A petabyte is equivalent to 1 million gigabytes, or 1,000 terabytes.

"This data is all raw, unprocessed, that must be downstream to terrestrial data centres. By placing data centres in space, we’ll have the ability to store and process this data in space, enabling the data owners to make informed decisions in real time," he added.

The rule seems to be: the more data centres, the merrier. 

Data centre capacity is measured by tracking key resources like power (megawatts), cooling, physical space (rack units), network bandwidth, and storage capacity. 

In this day and age, redundancy of data (including cryptocurrencies) is the world’s most valuable possession.

Abu Dhabi-based Madari, one of several companies in the running specifically to address this challenge. 

Its solution: build space-based data centres.

Currently, the Emirati start-up is focussed on R&D of space tech and objects. Based in Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City, Madari is one of the pioneers seeking to send data centres in low-Earth orbit in space. 

“The solution to the burgeoning data challenges of our digital age may very well lie beyond the confines of Earth,” the company stated. 

It deems space-based data centres as “promising”. 

“By harnessing the limitless expanse of space, these centres offer the potential to not only meet the escalating demand for data storage but also to provide a sustainable and innovative approach,” the Abu Dhabi-based Madari Space stated on its website.

By 2028, it is estimated that more than 8,000 data centres will be in orbit with a $290 billion investment by 2028.

A number of companies have also taken action toward space-based data centre. 

Some are taking incremental approaches — small payload tech demonstrators and hosted GPU nodes — rather than attempting to replace entire terrestrial hyperscale campuses overnight. 

Contracts and partnerships with spacecraft builders, launch providers and systems integrators (for example Sidus, Intuitive Machines and Axiom Space) are central to moving from lab to orbit.

Here's the low-down on companies setting out to build data centres in space:

Lonestar describes itself as “Resiliency as a Service” (RaaS) and is developing space-based data storage and processing infrastructure, as per the company’s website. 

Starcloud is developing in-orbit data-centre infrastructure for storage and large-scale GPU compute, as per Y Combinator.

Madari Space is a startup looking to deploy orbital data-centres or data-processing/storage nodes in low Earth orbit, as per Arabian Gulf Business Insight.