China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) is reportedly planning to launch gigawatt AI space data centres over the next five years.
According to a report from Reuters on Thursday, citing Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, CASC said it will "construct gigawatt-class space digital-intelligence infrastructure," under a five-year development plan.
The space data centres will "integrate cloud, edge and terminal capabilities" and achieve the "deep integration of computing power, storage capacity and transmission bandwidth," the report said.
News of the plan follows a policy document from CASC last month in which it proposed putting "gigawatt-class" solar-powered hubs in orbit to supply energy for AI processing. The document says space-based solar power aligns with China’s upcoming 15th Five Year Plan, which will include AI development as a core pillar, Reuters said.
China’s Zhejiang Lab has already made moves towards that goal, having launched 12 LEO satellites in May 2025 to create a space-based computing cluster billed as the “Three-Body Computing Constellation.” Zhejiang Lab plans to create a constellation of 2,800 satellites with a total computing power of 1,000 peta operations per second.
The concept of data centres in space has been floating around for some time. In 2023, Thales Alenia Space launched the ASCEND project to study the technical and environmental feasibility of space-based data centres as a way to reduce the ecological impact of processing and storing data.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is keen on space data centres, having said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week that SpaceX plans to launch solar-powered AI data centre satellites within the next two to three years.
Jeff Bezos – founder of Amazon and space company Blue Origin – also backs the idea, although he has been more cautious on the time frame, saying at the Italian Tech Week in Turin in October 2025 that gigawatt-scale space data centres are between 10 and 20 years away.
Last November, US startup Starcloud launched a small satellite hosting a Nvidia H100 GPU, which it will use as a testbed for space-based data processing. The firm hopes to eventually launch a 5GW data centre satellite powered by a 4 sq km solar array.
UAE-based startup Madari Space is collaborating with an industrial accelerator program run by Thales Alenia Space to demonstrate space data centre technology. The firm plans to launch a nano-satellite this year with data storage and data processing components to test the technology.
The main attraction of putting data centres in space is that they won’t harm the earth’s environment, have plenty of access to solar power and are easier to keep cool.
However, Quentin A. Parker, director of the Laboratory for Space Research at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), recently told CNN that space has its own risks, including solar flares, radiation and space debris. Space data centres would also be harder costlier to repair if something goes wrong.
