SpaceX has applied for a licence from the Federal Communications Commission to deploy up to one million satellites, outlining plans to build large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) data centres in orbit, according to a regulatory filing cited by Bloomberg.<\/p>\n
In the application submitted late on Jan. 30, SpaceX said it intends to construct a solar-powered satellite network designed to address rising global demand for data processing driven by AI workloads. The constellation would function as distributed data centres in Earth orbit, powered by solar energy and cooled through radiative heat dissipation in space.<\/p>\n
SpaceX said the approach could avoid the high energy and infrastructure costs associated with cooling large terrestrial data centres, a growing challenge as AI computing demand accelerates worldwide.<\/p>\n
The proposal comes as SpaceX, founded by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, is preparing for a potential initial public offering later this year, according to people familiar with the matter. Bloomberg reported that the company has also been exploring strategic options, including a possible merger with Musk\u2019s AI startup xAI, which could combine satellite infrastructure, launch services and AI development under a single corporate structure. An alternative tie-up with Tesla has also been considered, Bloomberg added.<\/p>\n
Musk has repeatedly argued that space-based infrastructure could play a central role in the future of AI computing. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, he said that orbit could eventually offer the lowest-cost location for large-scale AI systems due to abundant solar energy and natural cooling conditions.<\/p>\n
Any such satellite deployment would require extensive regulatory review, given its unprecedented scale and potential implications for orbital congestion and spectrum use. The FCC has not yet commented on the application.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SpaceX has applied for a licence from the Federal Communications Commission to deploy up to one million satellites, outlining plans to build large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) data centres in orbit, according to a regulatory filing cited by Bloomberg. In the application submitted late on Jan. 30, SpaceX said it intends to construct a solar-powered satellite […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20245,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[130,1045,1720,5812,239,6523,316,5841,5951],"class_list":["post-20242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-elon-musk","tag-federal-communications-commission","tag-north-america","tag-satellite-constellation","tag-space-based-data-centers","tag-spacex","tag-united-states","tag-xai"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20242"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}