FCC filing outlines a path to 10 gigawatts of orbital computing power — on par with all the new electricity capacity the U.S. added to its grid last year.
LOS ANGELES, CA — June 30, 2026
Orbital Compute, Inc. ("Orbital") today announced plans for a constellation of up to 100,000 satellites designed to run artificial-intelligence workloads in space, detailed in a recent filing with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. At full scale, the constellation would deliver approximately 10 gigawatts of compute — comparable to the roughly 8.5 gigawatts of new power capacity added to the U.S. grid in the past year — without drawing on terrestrial electricity, land, or water.
Orbital's approach rethinks the data center from first principles. Each satellite functions as a single high-density rack — about eight of today's servers — powered by roughly 100 kilowatts generated by its own solar arrays. Each spacecraft spans about 100 meters and weighs roughly two tons.
By placing compute in a continuously sunlit orbit, Orbital expects to deliver a meaningful cost advantage over terrestrial data centers across a satellite's operating life, while sidestepping the grid constraints, permitting timelines, and community impacts that increasingly limit data-center growth on Earth.
"The demand for AI compute is outrunning what we can reasonably build on the ground — we're short on power, land, and water all at once. Space solves all three. Sunlight is constant, cooling is free, and there's no neighborhood to disrupt. We think the next generation of data centers won't be built in the desert — they'll be built in orbit."
— Euwyn Poon, Founder and CEO, Orbital
Orbital plans a phased rollout. A demonstration payload carrying a single GPU is targeted for launch aboard a Falcon 9 in 2027, followed by Orbital-1 — the company's first purpose-built satellite — in 2028.
Founded in 2026 and based in Los Angeles, Orbital is a team of engineers and operators building toward what it believes will become a foundational layer of global computing infrastructure.
Orbital is a Los Angeles-based company building data centers that operate in space. By generating power from the sun and rejecting heat directly into the cold of orbit, Orbital aims to deliver scalable, low-cost AI compute without the land, water, and grid constraints of terrestrial infrastructure. Learn more at orbital.inc.