Hines, the global real estate investment and development firm, acquired the Titusville Logistics Center — a 250,000-square-foot Class A industrial property on Florida's Space Coast — as aerospace tenants fill the region. The facility is fully leased. It is the most grounded possible investment in the most speculative possible thesis: that data centers are going to space, and the real estate supply chain for that journey starts in Florida.
David Steinbach, Hines's global chief investment officer, compared the moment to the early railroad era: "We are creating these new rails of the future. In this case, it's more into orbit instead of on the ground, but when you think about it that way, think about all the nodes that are going to get developed and created."
Steinbach on orbital data centers: "There is unlimited power in space because of the sun, there is unlimited cooling with the vacuum of space, and there's unlimited real estate in terms of where you can put these things." Data could be built on the moon and beamed to Earth. Several companies are already developing lunar 3D printing and construction methods.
The cooling argument for space-based data centers, articulated by a real estate investor rather than a technologist, is clarifying. On Earth, data centers consume power and water at a scale that makes communities hostile, regulators aggressive, and grid operators constrained. The terrestrial cooling problem is increasingly a political and regulatory problem, not just an engineering one.
In space: unlimited power from unobstructed solar. Unlimited cooling from the vacuum — passive radiative rejection to a heat sink at near absolute zero. No neighbors. No cooling towers visible from a residential street. No local water district rationing supply. The real estate industry understands land constraints and community opposition better than the cooling industry does. When real estate capital starts underwriting the space thesis, it is because the terrestrial site selection problem has become genuinely difficult.
Two companies are building the manufacturing capability for lunar data center construction. ICON, a Texas-based construction technology company, is working with NASA under its Small Business Innovation Research program to develop 3D printing technology for construction on the moon and Mars. The same machines that 3D-print buildings in Austin are being adapted for regolith-based construction in zero atmosphere.
Ethos, a California startup, has developed a cement analog made from anorthosite — the primary geological material of the lunar highlands. CEO Ross Centers: "Ethos takes the geological resources on the moon, and it turns them into buildable props." Anorthosite can also be processed into raw materials for solar panels and electrical conductors. The lunar surface contains the feedstock for its own power and construction infrastructure. You do not need to ship concrete from Earth.
Industrial warehousing on the Space Coast is a near-term, tangible play. Every piece of hardware that goes to the moon or into orbit ships from a building on Earth first. That supply chain — manufacturing, integration, testing, launch preparation — requires significant terrestrial real estate in Florida, Texas, and California.
The broader warehouse market is soft in 2025, with national vacancy at 8.5% due to tariff uncertainty. But space-support industrial is undersupplied in Florida and Texas. Hines is not betting that every data center moves to space. It is betting that the supply chain to support the ones that do is a real estate asset class worth owning now, when the competition is thin.
The cooling industry has the same bet available to it. Passive radiative systems for orbital data centers. Thermal interface materials designed for launch loads and vacuum operation. Heat pipe systems scaled to satellite form factors. These are small markets today. They are the downstream of a capital formation cycle that is clearly underway.