data centres detected in space
why is this number still only one?
the first orbital data centre — Starcloud-1 — became operational in November 2025. it is a single satellite deployed to low Earth orbit (≈325 km) carrying an Nvidia H100-class GPU and purpose-built systems for AI training and inference. early reported workloads include NanoGPT training experiments and Gemma inference runs.
space is hard: launches are expensive, cooling requires radiators and careful thermal design, and radiation hardening raises costs. because of those constraints, most other satellites with onboard compute are still experiments or marketing exercises and don’t qualify as full operational data centres yet.
as launch costs fall and demand for edge compute near space assets grows, we expect more deployments — but for now this counter reflects one single operational node: Starcloud-1.
operational status
Starcloud-1 is the pioneering orbital data centre, actively processing workloads at ~325 km altitude. other projects exist — for example, a Chinese "Three-Body Computing Constellation" launched 12 satellites in May 2025 — but those clusters are still scaling and have not reached full, single-facility operational status.
planned deployments
several competitors and national efforts are public: Aetherflux targets Q1 2027 for its first "Galactic Brain" node, while OrbitsEdge and Orbit AI have indicated plans for 2026 launches. many efforts remain single-node prototypes or distributed experiments rather than full-scale, production orbiting data centres.
market context
market forecasts project strong growth for in-orbit data centre services (for example, estimates range from ~$1.78B in 2029 to ~$39B by 2035), driven by AI workloads and demand for compute close to space assets. today, deployments are mostly experimental and single-unit. there are more than 11,700 active satellites in orbit, but Starcloud-1 is the only one currently marketed and operating as a full data centre.