Elon Musk’s SpaceX has filed plans with U.S. regulators to launch up to one million satellites into low-Earth orbit. Together, these satellites will act as an orbital data center to power artificial intelligence.
SpaceX currently operates between 9,300 and 9,600 of the 14,000 or so active satellites that are orbiting Earth; those SpaceX satellites provide the company’s Starlink Internet service to millions of customers worldwide. The scale of the new proposal is far and away the largest of any planned satellite constellation. Including this filing, there are an estimated 1.7 million proposed satellites worldwide, according to a social media post from astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who tracks satellite constellations via his blog.
“I think it is going to be extremely difficult to operate such a huge number of satellites safely,” McDowell says. “This is a factor-of-100 increase over the already large number extant today, so a factor of 10,000 in the number of close approaches in the absence of careful station keeping.”
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SpaceX offers few details about the satellites, such as their size, specific orbits or even cost. But the company does say it plans to stick the satellites in “largely unused orbital altitudes” within an altitude range of 500 to 2,000 kilometers.
The spacecraft would be positioned to maximize time in the sun so that they could run on solar power. That’s a major argument in favor of orbital data centers that has been frequently cited by AI leaders, including Musk, who also owns xAI, the start-up behind the chatbot Grok. The build-out could also boost SpaceX’s plan to go public later this year—and to potentially merge with xAI.
“Freed from the constraints of terrestrial deployment, within a few years, the lowest cost to generate AI compute will be in space,” wrote SpaceX in the filing. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Despite SpaceX’s bullishness on the potential for AI, the proposal has been met with concern by some in the astronomy community. Peter Plavchan, a professor of astronomy at George Mason University, wrote in a social media post that whoever can occupy most of the usable orbits around Earth first will effectively prevent any other company or nation from hosting satellites in those orbits. “It’s the ultimate first-mover territorial claim strategy in lieu of off-world space regulations,” Plavchan wrote.
Editor’s Note (2/2/26): This article was edited after posting to include comments from Jonathan McDowell and to correct the descriptions of his social media post and the number of active satellites that are orbiting Earth.
