TECHNOLOGY STRATEGY
and natural resources by shifting energy- and water-intensive compute away from terrestrial data centres, reducing demand on land, water supplies and electrical grids”.
From a financial perspective, the company argues that orbital infrastructure lowers the marginal cost of compute capacity. In its FCC filing, it adds:“ The built-in efficiencies of solar-powered satellites, always-on solar energy, lack of land or displacement costs and nonexistent grid infrastructure disparities fundamentally lower the marginal cost of compute capacity compared to terrestrial alternatives”.
This bottleneck is prompting rival companies to pursue even larger-scale orbital computing plans.
SpaceX, for example, has filed its own application for up to one million orbital data centre satellites. This proposal, which would operate in low earth orbit( LEO), drew opposition from Amazon, which operates a rival satellite telecoms operation to Starlink. Amazon called on the FCC to deny the application, claiming it would take“ centuries” to deploy and stating that the application lacks basic details including satellite design, the radio frequency characteristics of the units and“ any plan for managing conjunctions or interference at million-satellite scale”.
78 May 2026