The reliability and sovereignty of digital infrastructure are increasingly constrained by terrestrial environmental and geopolitical conditions beyond the control of any single organisation. This paper presents a structured technical and economic analysis of Low Earth Orbit as a viable deployment environment for commercial compute and storage infrastructure. The analysis covers radiation-induced Single Event Upsets, thermal management without convective cooling, and the elimination of human maintenance cycles, with corresponding mitigation architectures including Triple Modular Redundancy, closed-loop radiative cooling, and structural over-provisioning. Economic viability is assessed drawing on the European Commission's ASCEND project findings and current global launch cost trends. The paper concludes that orbital infrastructure is a strategically sound solution for cold archive, AI training data storage, and sovereign data preservation workloads.
Venkata Srinivas Kantamneni (2026) studied this question.