China · Elon Musk · SpaceX · Tom's Hardware
China unifies tech sector to build grid-free orbiting satellite AI data centers, challenging Elon Musk's SpaceX
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◎ Multiple-sources
The Chinese government quietly approved the Space Computing Industry Innovation Center in early June, which aims to bring together rocket and satellite manufacturers, semiconductor fabs, and AI tech companies to build a space computing network.
Key facts
- It even seems that the former is intent on vertical integration, with its new 11-million-square-foot (around 190 to 200 football fields) Gigasat factory and Musk’s TeraFab megaproject
- Jeff Bezos is also getting into the game with the 51,600-satellite Project Sunrise set to operate in a sun-synchronous orbit
- The Chinese government quietly approved the Space Computing Industry Innovation Center in early June, which aims to bring together rocket and satellite manufacturers, semiconductor fabs, and AI tech
- While Beijing made this quiet announcement earlier than Musk’s AI1 reveal, they should note that Elon already had technical details available during the interview
Summary
The center is set to be officially launched later this month, and it will focus on six major research areas: highly reliable, heat-resistant space-native computing chips, high-performance hyper-interconnected space computing payloads, space computing satellite platforms and standard systems, space-based large models under constrained power conditions, integrated space-ground cloud-based measurement and control networking, and space computing power service-oriented and tokenized operations. While Beijing made this quiet announcement earlier than Musk’s AI1 reveal, they should note that Elon already had technical details available during the interview. What makes China’s announcement different, though, is that it’s making multiple companies work together to build a system.