The Next One Hundred Trillion Dollars’ Industry value chains

Digital Asset Markets by Nicky Okoye

As the race to become global leaders in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution heats up, some very obvious winners are already emerging. The drive for AI dominance has deep implications for national competitiveness, military superiority, and economic prosperity. The reasons are obvious: the Next 100 Trillion Dollars (N1HTD) in global GDP growth is expected to come from a very select set of industries, especially Artificial Intelligence. It is pertinent to note that the AI industry is built on the bedrock of the computer revolution of the 1950/60s, the Information Technology revolution of the 1970s/80s, which was termed Web-1, giving rise to the personal computer, software as a service, and the ability to integrate as well as communicate globally over computer systems. The next layer of the foundation is called Web-2, which brought about the World Wide Web revolution, mostly in the 1990s. This era included Windows 95, a landmark Microsoft project that changed the information technology industry forever. Several enterprises and business models were built on Web 2, including Amazon, Facebook (now Meta), Google, Salesforce, Shopify, Spotify, and Alibaba. We are currently in the Web-3 era, which has integrated new technologies built on top of the Web-2 infrastructure to provide cutting-edge solutions that are transforming the world. One such technology that fits this description is Blockchain technology. Web-3 is taking the World in an unprecedented direction, with exceptional, national-grade information technology infrastructure carrying compressed data streams across industries, including finance, entertainment, and business applications such as Netflix, Zoom, Prime, and Palantir. Worthy of note here is the impact on the global investment industry, where new forms of digital assets and securities, such as cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based digital tokens, are traded on distributed ledger systems (blockchains) layered on the foundation of all previous IT-related revolutions.

In this respect, National leaders, policymakers, Enterprise executives, and Entrepreneurs will all need to fully understand how these trends are evolving in the months and years ahead, and how they will ultimately reshape geopolitical regions of the World. Understanding the Next One Trillion Dollars, its drivers, its pillars and its anchor industries is a requirement for leadership at all levels.

Our focus is on the Digital Asset Markets, which are layered on Blockchain technologies. I expect that this digital asset marketplace we are currently creating will have the most significant impact for Africa’s future including determining the Nation-states that will create 21st century jobs, while providing the World with unfettered access to investment platforms that are secure, affordable and that give the Nation State the ability to leverage real-world assets in an effort to raise significant funding for development while attracting global institutional investment.

AI value chain and the rise of Data Centres

One thing that is very evident to me is that the ability to support the emerging AI world, the worlds of blockchain and digital assets, will all depend on the value chains that have become more pronounced in recent years. We cannot, for instance, expect to operate effective digital asset markets or AI industries without well-situated data centres providing cloud, storage, and data access integration across the World. A new race is underway, and analysts are likening it to the race to build gold refineries during the gold rushes of the 17th and 18th centuries, or to the race to build petroleum refineries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the World shifted to hydrocarbon-based energy. The entire AI industry is highly dependent on four feeders: AI-grade semiconductors, UV Lithography machines that make AI-grade chips, data centres, and sustainable energy.

Data Centre Challenges

The 21st-century data centres are energy guzzlers. It is estimated that over 3% of the world’s power demand comes from data centres. In addition, data centres consume large amounts of fresh water for cooling systems. Some nation-states, such as Singapore in 2020 and Ireland in 2025, have had to use regulatory speed bumps to slow data centre growth in their countries to safeguard their energy supply, which must be maintained for local populations first and foremost. To meet this growing challenge head-on, innovators and entrepreneurs are now looking to space for solutions to 21st-century data centres.

Data Centres in Space

As of the middle of 2024, enterprises and some of the World’s most ambitious entrepreneurs began looking to space as the best location for 21st-century data centres. It is expected that by as soon as 2030, we will have orbital data centres encircling the World, drawing power from the sun and providing the entire globe with the requirements of global data access and integration.

Currently, we are witnessing hosted experiments, small on-orbit compute nodes, cloud-satellite integration, and proof-of-concept edge processing for Earth observation, usually in the form of racks on the ISS/privately operated platforms.

By the 2030s and beyond, we expect to see reductions in launch cost targets which will allow Starship reusability, and other competitors to take off commercially. As solar power servicing solutions mature, larger orbital data centres will become much more commercially viable.

Major advantages of Space Data Centres over Earth Data Centres

Proximity to space assets: Space satellites are already widely used for data access and integration across many systems worldwide, including military and commercial ones. In this respect, siting data centres in space will be ideal for high-volume, latency-sensitive processing of satellite-based data (EO, communications). As computing is co-located with satellites, it reduces backhaul.

Global reach/coverage: It has an unprecedented ability to cover the entire world. LEO constellations paired with orbital computing power will offer services to remote regions with limited ground infrastructure.

Solar power: Space Data Centres will have access to an uninterrupted, continuous power supply. This unobstructed solar power source will serve for much of its orbit, enabling high solar availability. It will certainly require radiators and energy management, which can be managed by design adjustments.

Resilience and survivability: In some design architectures, distributed orbital nodes are less vulnerable to regional terrestrial disruptions (natural disasters, geopolitical attacks), which is useful for redundancy.

Regulatory/sovereignty options: In some cases, hosting data centres in space will avoid specific national jurisdictions, which have policy/use‑case implications (complex legal/regulatory tradeoffs).

Cooling advantages: Radiative cooling to space can be efficient for certain thermal designs.

Space Data Centre Challenges

It is important to note that the harsh space environment can cause radiation damage to electronics, atomic oxygen exposure, and thermal cycling. This will require hardened or redundant designs, resulting in increased costs and reduced component density.

In addition, it is hard to conduct maintenance and repair in Space. Servicing an orbiting computer-based data centre is a very costly venture and could be limited. Therefore, each unit must have very high fault tolerance, and the ability to be repaired remotely should be almost mandatory.

We expect to see full-scale orbital data centres in the medium term (late 2020s to 2030s). We expect that the costs will slow things down unless launch/servicing costs fall dramatically. In addition, we expect to see a phased adoption: hosted experiments → small commercial modules on stations → scaled free‑flying facilities only after launch/operations economics improve.

SpaceX

SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, is already using its networking layer (Starlink), with 9,347 satellites in orbit, is positioning itself to upgrade some of its systems to uplink data centres.

Starlink’s massive LEO communications constellation is designed to provide global, low-latency bandwidth, making orbital computing power more accessible. This design is known to enable a much faster downlink/uplink to the ground cloud systems. The payload launch mass is a major consideration and could determine a competitive advantage.

Amazon and Project Kuiper

Jeff Bezos’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) is expanding its ground capacity and integrating cloud services with satellite operators (ground stations and edge computing integrations). AWS is already well-positioned to host satellite data workflows, and once the designs are tested and ready, it will be able to host in-space computing power.

Project Kuiper is AMAZON’s planned broadband LEO constellation; it is very similar to Starlink. We expect that its design will improve the business case for space‑native applications.

Blue Origin, a Jeff Bezos initiative, is currently developing launch and habitat technologies. Still at the ground floor, its planned orbital data centres will be connected to commercial space station concepts that will host computing.

Cost Implications

Launch cost: Launching large payloads into space is expensive. For instance, several thousand USD/kg (varies). Starship plans to reduce payloads to the low hundreds of USD/kg or less. Lowering launch costs by an order of this magnitude will make much larger orbital data centres plausible.

Hardware and packaging: Radiation-hardened or fault-tolerant server hardware, shielding, thermal control, power conversion, communications, easily tens of millions of dollars for modest systems, hundreds of millions for larger racks.

Power generation & thermal management: solar arrays, batteries, radiators, especially multi-MW systems, increase complexity and cost, which can run into hundreds of millions of US dollars.

On-orbit operations & servicing: The use of Robotics or crew servicing, replacement parts, deorbiting/insurance, and ongoing operational expenses imposes much higher overall costs on the management and maintenance of the Space data centres.

Indeed……Great Things are Happening.

Dr Nicky Okoye

Global Investment Advisor

Founder, Global Investment Advisory Community (GIAC)