Chinese aerospace firm unveils massive space computing plan

A Chinese commercial aerospace company has unveiled a roadmap for a massive 2,800-satellite space computing network, following the world's first successful orbital deployment of a general-purpose large language model.

The "Star-Compute" plan, spearheaded by Chengdu ADAspace Technology Co, Ltd that specializes in building space-based AI computing infrastructure, aims to build an integrated space-based processing web to serve autonomous vehicles, drones, and robots, across land, sea, and air.

The "Star-Compute" network is designed to solve the global appetite for computing power by pushing processing capabilities into Earth's orbit. High-speed data transfer will be facilitated through inter-satellite and satellite-to-ground laser communication links, it said.

The announcement, made during a seminar organized by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology on Monday, follows a major technical breakthrough in November 2025.

ADASpace successfully uplinked and deployed Alibaba's Qwen-3 LLM to its inaugural orbiting space computing center, which completed multiple on-orbit inference tasks. The full end-to-end loop—uploading prompts, processing on the satellite, and returning data to the ground—took less than two minutes, it said.

This marked the first time a general-purpose AI model has been transitioned from ground control to an operational satellite constellation for in-orbit reasoning, allowing for dynamic updates and continuous optimization of the model while in space.

The company aims to have full assembly of the 2,800-satellite constellation by 2035, capable of providing space-based computing services to hundreds of millions of silicon-based agents globally.

The International Energy Agency predicts that data center electricity consumption will double by 2030, raising sustainability concerns.

Space offers radical advantages for reconstituting computing infrastructure, including low-cost energy and natural cooling, making space computing more than just a technical fix for energy shortages but more of a vital component of future national competitiveness, said ADASpace.