A ‘Heavenly‘ Hedge to DC NIMBYism?

Research evidence excerpt

A ‘Heavenly‘ Hedge to DC NIMBYism?

IdeaMconnections from March 2026 while they study the grid.

Recent examples of large tech firms jumping on the ‘space wagon’:

• Google (Project Suncatcher): Announced Nov 2025 with Planet Labs,

planning prototype sats with TPUs for 2027.

• NVIDIA: Launched Vera Rubin Space Module chips in March 2026 - 'space-

qualified' chips for orbital AI data centers. See recent job posting: Principal

Architect, System Software - Orbital Data Center | NVIDIA Corporation

• Amazon: Expanding Amazon LEO (formerly Kuiper) constellation with AI/

data center connectivity focus.

• Blue Origin: Announced TeraWave constellation of around 5,400 sats in Jan

2026 for high-speed data center connectivity. Deployment to begin late 2027

and remains in planning phase.

• Meta: Announced (Apr 2026) a deal to buy up to 1GW of power from

startup Overview Energy to beam solar energy from satellites down to earth

to help run Meta data centers.

Chinese efforts for space-based AI infrastructure:

• CASC: In Jan 2026, China’s main aerospace contractor (China Aerospace

Science and Technology Corporation) announced plans to build GW-scale

space-based AI data centers within 5 years.

• 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030): China's national blueprint, approved by

the NPC in March 2026, writes space-based AI compute into its space-

infrastructure agenda, calling for gigawatt-scale orbital "digital and

intelligent" infrastructure by 2030. This formalizes the target CASC first

outlined in January 2026 and anchors the company-level efforts above.

• Three-Body Computing Constellation: ADA Space (Guoxing Aerospace) and

Zhejiang Lab launched the first 12 of a planned 2,800 satellites in May 2025

(5 POPS, 30 TB storage). In Nov 2025 they ran Alibaba's Qwen3 on the

cluster.