The AMD BC-250 has taken on a new life. It’s a PS5 APU that was repurposed for mining during the crypto boom, and now it’s being repurposed once again as a Linux gaming board. The BC-250 has seen some coverage in years past. It was originally a board you could pick up for less than $100, but now you’ll likely spend over $200 on one. We’re taking a closer look at the board and the performance it offers now for a few key reasons.

First, we have the Steam Machine. Valve’s long-awaited console-like PC is here and much more expensive than anyone expected at over $1,000. You can easily put together a BC-250 build for around $400 or $500, and even less if you have a power supply and SSD lying around. If you can get in the realm of Steam Machine performance for half the price (and the BC-250 can, based on our testing), that’s pretty compelling.

There have also been some significant developments among the BC-250 community. The board only works in the first place due to a community-developed BIOS and GPU driver, and developers have continued to experiment with what’s possible with the hardware. Now, there are tools that enable all 40 Compute Units (CUs) on the board (it defaults to 24 CUs), as well as tools to enable the two disabled Zen 2 cores, taking the six-core CPU to an eight-core CPU.

Now, the BC-250 isn’t a cut-down PS5 APU, at least from a hardware perspective. It actually patches two more graphics CUs compared to the PS5. Though, as should become clear throughout this story, relating the BC-250 to the PS5 on anything but the silicon on the board isn’t the best idea.

All in, we spent about $350 on the BC-250, with around $200 of that going toward the board (it’s currently listed for around $175 on eBay) and the additional budget going toward a 3D-printed case, fans, and a power supply. You could spend as little as the cost of the board if you can 3D print a case, bring your own fans, and repurpose an old PSU and NVMe SSD. If you’re starting from scratch, you’ll spend between $400 and $500.

Even for “full” price, the BC-250 is significantly cheaper than what you can get elsewhere. The PS5 digital edition is now $600, while the Pro will run you $900. The newly-released Steam Machine starts at $1,050, and that’s with just 512 GB of storage. The BC-250 is significantly cheaper and offers performance that can rival these platforms. What you save in money, however, you spend in time.

The BC-250 is a great project if you like tinkering, but it’s not a set-it-and-forget-it gaming device, even after the initial setup. After a few weeks of using the board, that much became clear.

A PS5 APU, not a PS5: BC-250 specifications

The BC-250 is described as a cut-down PS5 APU, and that’s exactly what it is, but the “cut-down” portion of the description carries a lot of weight. It comes with eight Zen 2 cores, but two of them are disabled, and a 40-CU RDNA 2 GPU, though only 24 of those CUs work out of the box.

The community has been able to unlock all 40 CUs with good success. Ultimately, your mileage with unlocking all 40 CUs will vary; some boards will work just fine with all 40, others with 32 or 36, and some with the base 24. As I’ll dig into more later, I was able to unlock all 40 CUs and run them stably up to 1,850 MHz, much higher than the recommended 1,500 MHz max frequency.

Out of the box, both the CPU and GPU run at locked frequencies of around 3.5 GHz and 1,500 MHz, respectively. You’ll need to separately install a GPU and CPU governor for dynamic frequency scaling (a necessity in the case of the GPU, though optional for the CPU). Achievable frequency on the CPU and GPU is entirely determined by your thermals. Both governors allow for overclocking, but the BC-250 is thermally constrained, even with active airflow, so don’t expect to push far beyond the stock frequency, particularly on the CPU.

Unfortunately, storage is a big bottleneck for the BC-250, and one of the biggest points of divergence compared to a PS5. The M.2 runs at just PCIe 2.0 x2 speeds, delivering about 1 GB/s of maximum performance with an NVMe SSD. The good news is that, due to how slow the interface is, you can save some money and get a less-performant but larger drive for storage.

As of a few days ago, at the time of writing, some initial fixes to unlock the extra two CPU cores have rolled out, which I was able to get working after a bit of trial and error. Outside of the GPU and CPU, the BC-250 has a bit less L3 cache. The APU, from a hardware perspective, is very similar to the PS5. Though that ignores the complex I/O system present in the PS5, not to mention the various layers of software that Sony runs on the APU.

Given that the BC-250 wasn’t designed for gaming, it’s important to keep that context in mind. You could just as easily describe it as a crypto mining board that’s been repurposed for gaming as you could a PS5 APU that’s been repurposed for mining. The BC-250 is a mining board, and the only reason it works is due to a large number of enthusiasts trying to get the damn thing to work and sharing their advancements along the way.

Although Linux gaming broadly has made a ton of advancements over the past few years, the BC-250 has unique hurdles you need to overcome. It needs fixes to scale the frequency on both the CPU and GPU; otherwise, it’s locked at a fixed frequency. It needs a custom BIOS image to even boot, and a specific configuration in the BIOS to avoid immediately crashing. Those are all steps you need to take to get the BC-250 to work in the first place, let alone start optimizing it to squeeze out the best performance.

There is extensive community documentation for the BC-250, which I referenced ad nauseam throughout this process. It’s an excellent resource, but even still, I had to search out solutions outside of the documentation. This is cobbled together from community fixes, and the documentation seeks to cover as many distros as possible. But it’s nigh impossible to have complete documentation on the BC-250, as valiant as the effort linked above is.

Expect a bumpy (but rewarding) road. It’s better to think of the BC-250 as a project, rather than a commodity like the PS5. Yes, you can play games on it and get surprisingly good performance, but you’ll spend a good amount of time simply tinkering with the machine, at first to get it to work, and later to optimize it. And you will inevitably run up against games that either don’t work or have poor performance, prompting another investigation and optimization cycle. I find the process rewarding; others will find it frustrating.

Setting up and configuring the BC-250

Getting the BC-250 is only one part of the process here. At the least, you need a power supply that can deliver at least 20A on the 12V rail. A standard PSU will work, but FlexATX power supplies are a better fit. I ended up purchasing a 3D-printed case, along with a power supply, from eBay. The BC-250 documentation includes several PSU recommendations, along with case designs, if you want to go about choosing your parts piecemeal.

Here’s what I’d recommend at minimum:

• BC-250
• 300W+ PSU (at least 20A on 12V rail)
• 2x Arctic P12 high-pressure fans (if using CU unlock)

Regardless of the route you choose, double-check fan mounting points (there aren’t any mounts on the BC-250 itself) and case/PSU compatibility. Many small form factor BC-250 designs you can 3D print are designed around a FlexATX PSU. Before booting, verify your 8-pin pinout against the community documentation. If the 12V pins are in the wrong position, you can fry your board.

With the board ready, the first step is to flash a new BIOS from the shell. It’s straightforward enough, though without the modern conveniences of firmware flashback in the event of a failure. If you lose power, you’ll brick your board and need a hardware controller to reset it, so I recommend connecting to a UPS during the flashing process. You can grab the correct files from the documentation.

From there, you need to clear your CMOS by removing the battery and configure a few BIOS options to force the integrated graphics, set the UMA frame buffer size, and disable IOMMU. From there, you need to choose which Linux distro you’re going to use, which is very important. I’d recommend experimenting with a few different distros, especially if you’re new to Linux.

For gaming, the go-to options are Bazzite and CachyOS, the former of which I originally went with. There are some “optimized” images floating around for the BC-250 that supposedly rope in all of the configuration and fixes you need into a fresh OS image. I wouldn’t recommend using those. Setting up the BC-250 is getting easier by the day (I have found new fixes and scripts that automate installing several fixes just in the time I’ve been testing the board), so these optimized images are, at best, out of date, and at worst, not actually optimized at all. Tread carefully.

You don’t need an optimized image because, at least for Bazzite and CachyOS, scripts exist that can automate the entire setup process. Strictly speaking, the only thing you need is the GPU governor. Previously, you would need a kernel patch, but a GPU governor via an SMU now exists and is what I used. The governor is what allows dynamic frequency scaling on the GPU, as well as overclocking.

You’ll also need a compatible kernel, which is easier to manage on rolling distros like CachyOS. 6.18.18 LTS is the recommended kernel at the time of writing, but 6.17.11+ works, along with 6.12.x to 6.14.x LTS. Other kernels may work, though some (such as 6.15.0) are broken and will trigger a kernel panic.

With your distro chosen and a correct kernel working, here are the optimization steps I took:

• Install GPU and CPU governor
• Unlock 40 CUs
• Setup Zswap with 32GB swap page
• Install ACPI fix
• Configure PWM sensors

Again, scripts exist for these patches, the most critical of which don’t even require kernel patching any longer. The exact fixes you need and the method to install them will depend on the distro you choose, however, so make sure to keep the setup documentation handy.

The list above is in order of importance. Once you have the GPU governor, the next step is to try to enable the full GPU. Previously, you would need a kernel patch, but the bc250-cu-live-manager utility can enable the CUs via a User Mode Register (UMR) without the need for a kernel patch. Not only is this easier to do, but it also persists across updates, unlike a kernel patch, where new kernels will force you to go through the unlock process again. The end result is identical regardless of the path you choose.

I spent a good deal of time testing the 40 CUs before doing any other optimizations, and I’d recommend you do the same. Just because the board has 40 CUs doesn’t mean you can use all of them. I was able to unlock all 40, though not at the frequencies some others have reported. And some users aren’t able to use all 40, rooting out bad clusters for a 32-CU or 36-CU configuration. Overclocking-like trial and error is necessary here, though, as we’ll get to in the performance section later, experimenting is worth the hassle. Using all 40 CUs, even at suboptimal clock speeds, offers much better performance.

Although setting everything up on Bazzite should be easy, I ran into issues numerous times. It’s an immutable OS image, which can cause problems depending on the fixes you’re trying to apply. It’s a great choice if you want to quickly set up the BC-250, but it became clear that an immutable image isn’t optimal if you want to get the best performance. Further, some newer fixes simply wouldn’t work, such as unlocking the extra two CPU cores.

The CachyOS pivot

After a few days of optimizing, testing, and troubleshooting Bazzite, I made the hard decision to wipe the machine and start fresh with CachyOS. In hindsight, I should have started with CachyOS from the beginning for numerous reasons, but mainly because it’s a rolling Arch-based distro. Bazzite is a Fedora Atomic-based distro. It’s immutable, adding guardrails to make it difficult to break anything, but in the process, making it much more difficult to apply low-level changes like kernel patches.

If you’re not familiar with Linux and don’t care to become familiar, Bazzite is your best bet. It’s convenient, and it includes a ton of small community fixes right in the startup menu, such as the LSFG-VK project for Lossless Scaling. It became clear, however, that you’re trading performance for convenience with Bazzite. CachyOS is more hands-on, but it’s much easier to actually accomplish what you need to with the BC-250.

Most notably, CachyOS (and other rolling release distros) allow you to easily manage your kernel. There are alternative methods for critical setup items like the GPU governor and CU unlock that don’t require a kernel patch. However, having the ability to easily patch your kernel helps when you run up against compatibility or performance issues, allowing you to try alternative installation methods or community fixes.

Further, CachyOS has access to yay, or Yet Another Yogurt, the simple command-line call to search and install packages from the Arch User Repository (AUR). It takes some time getting used to living in the command line as often as you do on any Arch-based distro. But even knowing just a few basic commands allows you to accomplish what you want much faster than fumbling around with flatpaks, at least in my experience.

Getting set back up was simple thanks to a community script that automates nearly all of the configuration and optimization for the BC-250. The BC250-Toolkit script brings together all of the various community patches, including optional optimizations, and it just worked. Coming off of Bazzite, it was a treat to run up against the immutable walls of the distro. I was able to accomplish in a few hours what took me more than a day with Bazzite.

CachyOS specifically has a few optimizations for gaming, as well. First, there’s the BORE, or Burst-Oriented Response Enhancer, scheduler that, as the name implies, is optimized for bursty workloads (Michael Larabel over at Phoronix has a great writeup on that). CachyOS also includes packages for x86-64 v3 and v4, the latter of which is relevant to the BC-250.

These optimizations represent a substantial performance improvement. In Forza Horizon 6, for example, I went from 61 FPS at 4K with the Low preset to 72 FPS on CachyOS after it was configured properly (with 40 CUs in both cases). In Cyberpunk 2077, I went from 74.7 FPS on Bazzite to 82.2 FPS at 1080p with the Steam Deck preset, and perhaps more impressively, from 47.8 FPS to 56.5 FPS at 1440p.

I saw higher peak performance on Bazzite in Unigine Superposition, though that’s likely due to more thermal headroom for the GPU, as I wasn’t able to enable the extra CPU cores on Bazzite. I mainly wanted to show this chart to bring the “optimized” Bazzite image into the fold, which was supposedly an image that was already configured for the BC-250. Using a script to automate the installation of several tools (like the one available for CachyOS) is one thing. Using an entirely custom image is another. I’d suggest starting with a clean, official image regardless of the distro you choose.

Testing performance on the BC-250

The best touchstone for comparisons with the BC-250 is the Steam Machine. The Steam Machine is more powerful simply based on the spec sheet. I ran a truncated list of benchmarks to see how the BC-250 stacks up, as well as several additional benchmarks on the BC-250 alone. Performance here is tough to compare fairly. Even just with CachyOS and Bazzite above, we see large performance differences. And, as will become clear in this section, there were numerous tests that either showed performance issues inconsistently or simply failed to run at all.

Our best point of comparison between the Steam Machine and BC-250 comes in Cyberpunk 2077. Neither machine is capable of achieving a playable frame rate at 4K, but the fully-optimized BC-250 is just 6.7% behind at 1440p. At 1080p, however, the performance drop is 16.1%, exposing perhaps the biggest performance issue with the BC-250.

Forza Horizon 6 also highlights this issue; the CPU in the BC-250 is very weak. It’s not only weak because it’s using the aging Zen 2 architecture, but it also has only six cores (or eight, if you can enable them). It’s such a hurdle because the clock speed is severely limited to just 3.5 GHz, the same as the PS5. We are completely CPU-bound at 1080p and even 1440p in Forza Horizon 6, and then miraculously, at 4K, the larger GPU of the BC-250 is able to take over and actually beat the Steam Machine.

A system so hamstrung by the CPU makes sense in the context of a console. Sony has a performance target, and it makes sense to opt for a weaker CPU and a more powerful GPU. The CPU can reach that performance target. But in the context of a PC where you’re given more options, resolutions, and performance-enhancing features, the limitation of the CPU becomes clear. There’s an obvious performance wall you’ll run into with the BC-250 that no amount of tweaking can solve.

For a clear view of the CPU limitation here, look at the Forza Horizon 6 benchmark above. Running at 1080p with Low graphics is going to induce a CPU bottleneck in most systems, but the gap between GPU render performance and CPU render performance here is massive. According to the game’s benchmark, we were bottlenecked by the CPU entirely throughout the run.

Even at 4K, you can see that the CPU is still a significant influence on performance in this game, showcasing just how unbalanced this system is. Again, that imbalance makes sense for the PS5, but it’s a critical caveat with the BC-250.

In the gallery above, you can browse our other comparative results to get an idea where the BC-250 lands. I’m going to move past comparisons and look at the BC-250 in isolation. An apples-to-apples comparison really isn’t possible (nor fair) with the BC-250. That’s not only due to the wide performance window depending on your specific board and software stack, but also the clear performance limitations of the BC-250 that require certain workloads that wouldn’t make sense with other machines.

Chief among those limitations is VRAM, and memory in general. You have just 16 GB of GDDR6 for the whole system, which is much less of an issue on the PS5 where there’s careful memory management. As you can see in the chart above, I don’t have 4K results for Spider-Man 2 or Doom: The Dark Ages, and that’s due to a lack of VRAM.

In both cases, the games crashed at 4K, but worse, they wouldn’t start back up. I made the mistake of flipping to 4K before turning FSR on, which locked me out of starting the game until I manually edited the settings file prior to launch. 4K is possible on the BC-250, though it has a very narrow performance window considering the VRAM limitations and CPU performance.

Although FSR Performance mode is ideal for 4K (50% scaling, 1080p input resolution), I opted for Balanced to avoid the CPU bottleneck we can see present in other games (you can even see it here in some games, such as Spider-Man 2). However, turning up the input resolution also puts a greater strain on VRAM. You’ll need time and patience to experiment with these more demanding titles to find the ideal balance of settings on the BC-250; of course, if you’re just playing Silksong, none of this matters much.

The VRAM limitation is also relevant for frame generation. With such a narrow memory footprint, you’ll struggle to use frame generation at 4K if you’re already pushing the VRAM to its limits (those buffered frames need to live somewhere). Thankfully, Lossless Scaling is an option on Linux with LSFG-VK, which doesn’t strain your VRAM like in-engine tools.

An important aspect of performance with the BC-250 is cooling. Most governor profiles cap temperature at 80 degrees for multiple reasons. First, the heatsink of the BC-250 is closed on top. You can sit and rip apart the top of the heatsink for direct airflow with a pair of tweezers, but I left the heatsink on my board intact for now, using two Arctic P12 fans to assist with cooling.

Cooling is all the more important with the 40CU unlock and enabling the extra two Zen 2 cores. Stress-testing in Furmark over a 20-minute run, you can see how quickly the GPU throttles from 1,850 MHz back down to 1,500 MHz as it reaches the temperature cap of 80 degrees.

Remember, however, that Furmark is a stress test. I wasn’t thermal throttling in games, with the CPU and GPU settling around 70 degrees in Doom: The Dark Ages. I’ve included CPU and GPU power in the chart above, as well, and you can see that, combined, they rarely poked over 100W. Keep in mind that we’re exclusively looking at GPU and CPU power here, not whole system power. Whole system power can peak above 225W.

The stock heatsink and dual Arctic P12S do a good job keeping the BC-250 chugging along, even with all of the silicon unlocked and a moderate overclock on the GPU. However, Furmark makes it clear that this current iteration of the system can’t sustain its performance over long periods of time. It would take longer for that drop to show up in the most demanding games, unlike in Furmark, where we can see the drop in just 20 minutes. But I plan on revisiting the cooling solution in this BC-250 build. Maybe I can even raise the temperature limit closer to the 100-degree TJmax.

The bad and the ugly of BC-250 gaming

Although the BC-250 offers compelling performance for the price, I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight the numerous quirks I ran into while testing. There are performance issues and limitations with the board that you can explain with hardware, and further compatibility issues that you can explain away with Linux. Then, there’s everything else: the weird bugs, quirks, and oddities that pop up when running a largely community-developed software stack on unofficial hardware that wasn’t built for this purpose.

The above image of Resident Evil 9 is a microcosm of what I’m talking about. The RE Engine is remarkably scalable, and that was on full display with my BC-250 testing. Requiem offered excellent performance, even all the way up to 4K. It didn’t feel like I was compromising much of anything with the BC-250. But then I turned on the “hair strands” setting, and the result is what you can see above.

No, it’s not due to the CU unlock, any overclock, or even the overlay you can see. It’s just something with this set of hardware, this software stack, and the hair strands setting in Resident Evil Requiem.

Similarly, in Doom: The Dark Ages, any resolution change I would apply necessitated a restart of the game. Otherwise, I’d get the ghostly streaking you can see in the image above. On one of these reboots, the game suddenly stopped rendering reflective surfaces, resulting in the strange black voids you can see below.

This isn’t a criticism of the BC-250, and certainly not of the remarkable work of the passionate developers and enthusiasts who’ve created fixes and workarounds for the hardware. The fact that this board boots at all and runs games is a minor miracle. The context of what the board is, however, is important.

You will, inevitably, run into strange issues that aren’t documented anywhere. These are two examples, but I also ran into strange problems elsewhere. The widely used MangoHUD overlay, for example, didn’t pull in my GPU’s clock speed correctly after an update, even after ensuring I applied the community fix through the GPU governor to map the reporting correctly. And once you add external devices, compatibility gets even more complex. The board doesn’t have Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, for example, and an external adapter should work (this UGreen Wi-Fi 6 adapter I purchased does), but it’s just as likely that a driver for another adapter doesn’t work or isn’t available.

I don’t have an issue with these quirks, but the BC-250 also isn’t my primary gaming machine. You should just be aware of them. And, if you’re going to invest in a BC-250 build of your own, be ready to encounter some strange issues that you might not be able to easily troubleshoot.

What’s next?

The BC-250 is a project, and like any good project, it isn’t done here. Now that I’ve messed around with the configuration, tried out different distros, got the critical mods working, and measured performance, I want to actually use the BC-250 long-term. Maybe I can find some additional optimization steps I can take, or workarounds for some of the strange issues that I noticed during testing. Regardless of what it is, I’m confident that I’ll mess around with the BC-250 more outside of just playing games on it.

My clear next step is to work on cooling. I kept things conservative here in order to get valid data in a timely manner, but I want to dig deeper into what I can do on the thermal front, not only to raise the temperature limit, but also to push the GPU overclock further. That may involve some CU tinkering, as well; if I can get similar performance at 36 CUs and better thermal headroom, I may be able to push higher overall performance.

• Stream Sky Sports from £24
• Unlock your stream with NordVPN (save 75%)

Sky Sports has been a byword for top quality sports broadcasting in the UK for more than 35 years. Launching in 1991 as just a single channel, it's now a twelve-station behemoth that hosts some of the most unmissable action from within the British Isles and around the planet.

Most significantly, perhaps, its story has been intimately entwined with that of the English Premier League since the latter's own inception in 1992. Sky Sports has held the lion's share of the coverage of the EPL – dubbed by many as the world's most entertaining soccer league – for all that time and, for the four seasons from 2025, will show no less than 215 games in each. For context, that's more than 50% of all matches and a number that dwarfs the 52 games to be shown on TNT Sports.

Name a sport and Sky Sports is likely to be one of the UK's key broadcasters. It shows all of England's home Test cricket matches, for example. It's the exclusive rights holder to all four golf majors and Ryder Cup, carries US action from the NFL and NBA, and has live coverage of every F1 Grand Prix each year.

As well watching on your television, all of Sky Sports' coverage is also available to take around in your pocket and bag thanks to the company's Sky Go app for mobiles, tablets, laptops and other streaming devices. Try streaming outside of the British Isles, however, and you'll soon be prevented from doing so. That's where downloading one of the best VPN services becomes your digital MVP – keep reading to discover why...

How to watch Sky Sports subscriptions

Subscribing to Sky Sports isn't exactly what you'd call cheap. To be fair, that's understandable once you account for the sheer amount of top class sporting coverage it provides.

If you don't already have a Sky TV plan of any description, you're looking at an outlay of £35 per month at the very least. That gets you access to all nine premium Sky Sports channels alongside the 100+ channels of Sky Essential TV and a basic Netflix subscription.

From there, you can then add additional channels and services to suit your tastes. To include TNT Sports, for example, you'll pay an extra £25 a month, while film fans can get Sky Cinema for an additional tenner. And for those that demand the best picture and sound quality possible, a further £6 a month adds UHD and Dolby Atmos.

You can sign up and tailor your Sky Sports plan here.

Already subscribe to Sky but don't have Sports? Adding the channels to what you already have costs between £20 and £25 per month, with prices changing frequently.

Note: all prices above are correct at the time of publish.

What channels does Sky Sports include?

• Sky Sports Main Event
• Sky Sports Premier League
• Sky Sports Football
• Sky Sports Cricket
• Sky Sports F1
• Sky Sports Golf
• Sky Sports Tennis
• Sky Sports Action
• Sky Sports+

Sky Sports Mix, Sky Sports News and Sky Sports Racing are three further channels, but these are all available as part of a bog standard Sky Tv plan.

Use a VPN to watch Sky Sports from anywhere

What sports can you watch on Sky Sports?

Listing every single sport here that the nine premium channels of Sky Sports show could have you scrolling for hours. But below is a summary of the goods on offer to subscribers...

Football

The 215 Premier League games that Sky Sports shows are just the tip of a very deep iceberg when it comes to its soccer coverage.

Sky's current deal with the EFL sees it broadcasting more than 1,000 matches per season between the Championship, League 1 and League 2, as well as all play-off games. And, for the EFL Cup, it now streams every single game.

Still in the UK, there's the Women's Super League, Scottish Premiership and NIFL from Northern Ireland. And for those who like their soccer continental, Sky Sports has Bundesliga coverage up to 2029.

Cricket

The dedicated Sky Cricket channel is well populated throughout the year, with international, domestic and franchise action over the 12 months.

All of England's home Tests, ODIs and T20Is are on Sky, which is likely to include the 2027 Ashes. Most overseas tours also tend to go out on Sky Sports, although it's worth noting that TNT Sports has started challenging on that front. Its international stronghold also means every single men's and women's ICC World Cup event until 2031.

Domestically, there's action from the County Championship, One Day Cup, T20 Blast and every match of The Hundred.

If you follow short-form white ball cricket around the planet, you can also use your Sky Sports subscription to watch every single wicket and six from the Indian Premier League (IPL), Carribean Premier League (CPL), Pakistan Premier League (PSL) and Lanka Premier League.

Golf

All four of golf's majors each year – the Open Championship, Masters, US Open and PGA Championship – form the backbone of a portfolio that includes 32 PGA Tour and 32 European Tour events annually.

The Women's British Open is also shown by Sky. And, every two years, Sky Sports goes all out on its exclusive Ryder Cup live coverage.

Motor Sports

Sky Sports shows every practice, qualifying session, Sprint race and Grand Prix of the F1 season (even the British GP, which is also shown for free on Channel 4 in the UK).

The broadcaster also has rights to Formula 2 and Formula 3, in addition to several IndyCar events from North America each year such as the Indy 500.

Rugby Union & League

Although it doesn't have much in the way of domestic rugby union from the UK, Sky Sports is the place to watch British and Irish Lions tours, the Rugby Championship and other selected international rugby, including August and September's Greatest Rivalry.

Rugby League lovers get their fill of 100+ Super League matches per season, together with live coverage of the World Club Challenge.

Tennis

While all ATP Masters 1000, 500 & 250 and WTA 1000, 500 and 250 events are shown by Sky Sports, the only Grand Slam it currently shows is the US Open.

Darts

All the biggest PDC darts tournaments are shown on Sky Sports, including the annual extravaganza that is the World Darts Championship from Alexandra Palace.

The Grand Slam of Darts, World Matchplay, World Grand Prix, World Cup of Darts and Premier League Darts action are all comprised within Sky Sports' rights holding.

American Sports

Sky Sports has really leaned into what the Brits call 'American Football'. It shows a vast number of NFL games each week of the regular season and playoffs. Naturally, that includes the Super Bowl (which is also shown on free-to-air TV in the UK).

It's also the exclusive rights holder of NBA basketball coverage in the UK, with its current contract going right on through until 2030.

You may also enjoy...

• How to watch UK TV from abroad
• How to watch Netflix from other countries
• How to watch Apple TV from anywhere

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example:1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service).2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad.We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

Concentrations of dangerous pollutants from rocket launches and satellite reentries in Earth's upper atmosphere might reach treacherous tipping points if constellations of hundreds of thousands of orbiting data centers get deployed in the next decade, experts say.

There's no question that Earth has an AI data center problem. By 2030, AI data centers may be responsible for up to 17% of electricity consumption in the U.S., according to a forecast by the Electric Power Research Institute. New fossil fuel power plants are being built to feed the growing demand for electricity, and aging ones are kept online despite decarbonization plans. On top of that, huge amounts of water are taken from already strained reservoirs to cool the computers.

Companies such as SpaceX, Amazon and Blue Origin say they have a solution: moving the power-hungry data crunching infrastructure into space, where solar power is easy to produce, and heat can be radiated out into the frigid vacuum. Combined, those companies have filed applications to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to launch more than a million orbiting data centers in the next 10 years. Most of those will belong to SpaceX, if all goes to plan; Elon Musk has said the company wants to operate a million-satellite AI constellation all by itself.

The plans are making atmospheric scientists tear their hair out. If all these projects come to fruition, the number of satellites being launched to space and reentering the atmosphere will increase 100 times compared to today's numbers.

Moreover, the data center satellites will be much larger than the spacecraft orbiting Earth today. This large mass will translate into higher quantities of polluting propellant needed to loft these systems off Earth and a much larger amount of metals vaporizing in Earth's atmosphere during reentry. Neither is good news for our planet's air.

Pristine upper atmosphere

"Launches and the reentries are really the only things that humans do that deposit material directly into the upper atmosphere," Aaron Boley, an astronomy professor and space sustainability researcher at the University of British Columbia, told Space.com. "And the way things mix in the upper atmosphere means that the launch and reentry emissions are by far more impactful."

Most rockets emit black carbon, which could worsen global warming. Satellite bodies are mostly made of aluminum, which likely turns into aluminum oxide when burned in the presence of oxygen. Aluminum oxide is known for its ability to trigger ozone depletion, a hazardous process that was successfully thwarted by the Montreal Protocol of 1987.

Currently, scientists don't have a precise understanding of the chemical reactions that occur between the pollutants and the atmospheric gases at high altitudes. They also don't understand the tipping points, which may mean the difference between minor and major impacts on the climate. What is worse, pollutants in the upper atmosphere remain much longer than those emitted by cars and factory chimneys close to the ground.

"Close to the ground, we have rain and wind that removes pollution from the atmosphere within weeks," Eloise Marais, a professor of atmospheric chemistry at University College London, told Space.com. "If we put it into the higher layers of the atmosphere, we rely on very slow atmospheric processes to bring this pollution back down."

Too many launches

Black carbon from rockets, for example, can stay in the atmosphere for three years, scientists think, meaning its concentrations could dangerously rise in the near future.

SpaceX's Starship megarocket is likely to play a key role in the deployment of data center constellations. Unlike SpaceX's current workhorse launcher Falcon 9, which burns a form of the aviation fuel kerosene, Starship combusts the much cleaner combination of methane and liquid oxygen. But Marais cautions that Starship's size and the much more frequent launches that will be needed to deploy the vast constellations would result in an overall increase in the pollution injected into the upper atmosphere.

"Starship is a bigger rocket burning more propellant," Marais said. "So, in terms of each rocket launch, the difference almost offsets. It has potential per launch to produce quite similar amounts of black carbon."

Andrew Wilson, a space sustainability researcher at Glasgow Caledonia University in the U.K., told Space.com that every single Starship launch produces around 76,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. That's about as much as 17,727 gasoline-powered passenger cars emit in a year.

And up to 77,000 Starship launches — some 15,300 per year — might be needed, according to estimates by Ars Technica, to deploy SpaceX's planned million-data-center constellation. That's a lot of rocket pollution added into the atmosphere. For comparison, there were just 324 orbital rocket liftoffs globally in 2025, according to Space News.

The space junk rain

Then there is the toxic ash from reentering satellites. Today, nearly 19,000 operational and defunct satellites orbit Earth, according to the European Space Agency. Currently, the most numerous type of satellite in Earth orbit is SpaceX's Starlink V2 Mini, each of which weighs about 1,760 pounds (800 kilograms). But SpaceX's orbital data centers are likely to be much more massive. Featuring solar arrays 246 feet (75 m) wide, every data center satellite might weigh up to 7.5 metric tonnes, according to available estimates.

Industry insiders expect that SpaceX and other providers would want to replace their AI satellites every five years with newer technology, as they do with existing communications satellites. As a result, tens or even hundreds of tons of metal may be reentering the atmosphere every year in the future, exceeding the amount of natural space rock that hits the planet.

The materials that satellites are made of are not naturally present in Earth's atmosphere, which means the consequences of such reentries can be unpredictable.

"Only 10 years ago, the reentries were not really a concern, because there were much more natural meteorites entering the atmosphere per year," Wilson said. "But if you have hundreds of thousands or millions of satellites in space at any one time, you are essentially going to create a rain of man-made materials, electronic equipment and metals that otherwise wouldn't be coming into the atmosphere."

He added that the situation is akin to ongoing climate change, which shows no signs of slowing down as humanity has so far failed to reduce carbon emissions.

"This is the most objects we've ever had in space, and we're continuing to propose more and more and more and more and more," Wilson said. "And there seems, in my opinion, to be very little consideration for the environment."

Not enough funding is currently flowing into research to answer the unknowns, Marais added.

"We need way more observations and way more time to be able to look into that," she said.

Boley concurred: "We absolutely have to understand, and we have to understand that before we actually launch a million satellites. Not that we launch them and wait [to see] what happens."

The plans of the satellite companies are stirring protests also among astronomers, who fear that the light pollution the constellations create will impact astronomical observations. A recent study by the European Southern Observatory concluded that, if all currently planned satellite constellation projects were to be built, astronomical research from the surface of Earth would no longer be possible.