China has announced a plan to build artificial intelligence data centers in Earth orbit within the next five years. State media reported that China’s main space contractor, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), has pledged to "build gigawatt-scale digital-intelligent infrastructure in space" under a five-year development plan cited by state broadcaster CCTV.
This ambitious project represents a direct challenge to the plans of Elon Musk and his company SpaceX, which intends to use proceeds from a planned IPO (initial public offering/stock market listing) worth approximately CZK 625 billion to develop orbital AI data centers.
Data Centers in Space
According to the report, the new space-based data centers will "integrate cloud, edge, and endpoint capabilities" and achieve "deep integration of computing power, storage capacity, and transmission bandwidth." This will make it possible to process data from Earth directly in space.
China plans to move energy-intensive artificial intelligence processing into orbit using gigawatt-scale solar-powered centers to create an industrial "Space Cloud" by 2030. A December CASC document identifies the integration of space-based solar energy with AI computing as a key pillar of the upcoming 15th Five-Year Plan, China’s economic development blueprint.
Musk Versus China
Elon Musk said at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week that SpaceX plans to launch solar-powered satellites with AI data centers within the next two to three years. "It is an obvious choice to build solar-powered data centers in space... the cheapest place to put AI will be space, and that will be true within two years, three at the latest," Musk said. According to him, solar power generation in orbit can produce five times more energy than panels on the ground. SpaceX expects to use proceeds from its planned IPO specifically to develop these orbital AI data centers in response to energy constraints on Earth.
Space Tourism and Other Plans
In its plan, CASC also pledged to "achieve flight operations for suborbital space tourism and gradually develop orbital space tourism" over the next five years. China and the United States are competing to be the first to turn space exploration into a commercially viable business similar to civil aviation, as well as to gain the military and strategic advantages of space dominance.
CASC has pledged to turn China into a "world-leading space power" by 2045. Beijing’s key obstacle so far is its inability to complete a reusable rocket test. With its reusable Falcon 9 rocket, the U.S. company SpaceX has enabled its subsidiary Starlink to achieve a near-monopoly on satellites in low Earth orbit, and the rocket is also used for orbital space tourism.
Rocket reusability is crucial for reducing launch costs and making it cheaper to send satellites into space. According to official announcements, China achieved a record 93 space launches last year, supported by rapidly developing commercial space startups.
Last year, the private Chinese company ADA Space launched 12 satellites for its Three-Body Computing Constellation, which it plans to expand to a total of 2,800 satellites. In December, the U.S. startup Starcloud became the first in the world to train an AI model from a satellite in orbit using an Nvidia card—it learned English from the complete works of William Shakespeare.
The Race for the Future
CASC’s plans were announced after China opened its first School of Interstellar Navigation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences on Tuesday. The goal is to educate the next generation of space talent in frontier fields including interstellar propulsion and deep-space navigation. The new institution signals China’s ambition to make a strategic transition from operations in low Earth orbit to deep-space exploration. "The next 10 to 20 years will be a window for leapfrog development in China’s interstellar navigation. Original innovations in basic research and technological breakthroughs will reshape the landscape of deep-space exploration," Xinhua wrote about the inauguration.
The United States faces intense competition from China in its efforts to return astronauts to the Moon, where no human has set foot since the last U.S. Apollo mission in 1972.
Sources: asiafinancial.com and jalopnik.com
