China Begins Deploying Orbital Supercomputer

China's ADA Space has launched the first 12 satellites in a planned network of AI supercomputers that will eventually consist of 2,800 satellites. The satellites are capable of processing data in orbit without relying on ground stations, greatly speeding up data analysis. The project, called "Star Compute," is part of the Three-Body Computing Constellation initiative.

Each of the 12 satellites is equipped with an 8 billion parameter AI model and can perform 744 trillion operations per second (TOPS). Together, they provide a capacity of 5 peta-operations per second (POPS) — for comparison, a PC running Microsoft Copilot requires only 40 TOPS. The project’s ultimate goal is to reach 1,000 POPS by deploying the entire network.

The satellites are linked by laser links at speeds of up to 100 Gbps and have a combined memory of 30 TB. They carry scientific instruments, including an X-ray polarization detector to study gamma-ray bursts. They can also create 3D digital twins for use in gaming, tourism and emergency management.

Traditional transmission of satellite data to Earth is slow and inefficient - less than 10% of the information gets through due to limited bandwidth. Orbital processing solves this problem.