  Terrestrial data centers suffer from a growing carbon footprint that could
contribute with $14\%$ to global CO2 emissions by 2040. High Altitude Platform
(HAP) is a promising airborne technology that can unleash the computing
frontier in the stratospheric range by hosting a flying data center. HAP
systems can endorse the sustainable green operation of data centers thanks to
the naturally low atmospheric temperature that saves cooling energy and its
large surface that can host solar panels covering energy requirements.
Throughout this article, we define the operation limitations of this innovative
solution and study the energy-efficiency-related trade-offs. Then, we shed
light on the significance of the scalability of the data center-enabled HAP
architecture by investigating potential bottlenecks and proposing different
deployment scenarios to avoid network congestion. We also highlight the
importance of the management agility of the data center-enabled HAP system by
defining effective management techniques that yield high-performing data
centers. Our results demonstrate that deploying a single data center-enabled
HAP can save $12\%$ of the electricity costs.
