If you look away from the orbital data center beat, you could miss a lot. Fortunately, I’m a bit obsessed with the whole space thing. Multiple companies continue to make space-related announcements, and they’re all pushing space compute a little further along the path from “this sounds crazy but it might just work” to something that could actually show up in procurement pipelines. (Find out who’s in the data-center space race)
Here are some of the latest happenings and why they’re significant:
Sophia Space signs on with the biggest compute cluster in orbit
April 2026: Kepler Communications, which flies the largest compute cluster currently in space — 10 satellites, roughly 40 Nvidia Orin edge processors, all linked by optical laser — added its newest customer, Sophia Space, a Pasadena startup that raised $10 million in February to build passively-cooled space computers. Under the agreement, Sophia will upload its proprietary orbital data center software to a Kepler satellite and try to run it across multiple edge computing nodes on different spacecraft. Next, Sophia plans to launch its own hardware in late 2027.
Deloitte puts two more cyber satellites in orbit
April 2026: Deloitte announced that two of its satellites, Deloitte-2 and Deloitte-3, launched on March 29 from Vandenberg, are now operational. They join Deloitte-1, which has been up there since March 2025 and, according to the firm, has traveled more than 150 million miles, mostly doing cyber defense research. All three satellites carry Silent Shield, Deloitte’s on-orbit intrusion detection system, according to the announcement. Project Constellation, as the whole initiative is called, is eventually supposed to include nine satellites as well as a software-only version of Silent Shield that can be pushed to satellites already in orbit, without waiting for a new launch.
This isn’t a data center announcement as such, but as more compute shows up in orbit, the question of how you secure a satellite you don’t own stops being hypothetical.
Orbital sets 2027 date for first AI inference satellite
April 2026: Orbital, a Los Angeles company backed by a16z Speedrun, announced that its first test mission, Orbital-1, will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in April 2027. The satellite will carry NVIDIA Space-1 Vera Rubin GPUs — the 2027 chip that Nvidia previewed at GTC in March — and focus specifically on AI inference workloads rather than training, according to the announcement. “Training large AI models requires thousands of GPUs tightly coupled,” said CEO Euwyn Poon in the statement. “Inference is different. Each request is handled independently.”
Orbital is betting that distributed inference can scale as a constellation, with each satellite handling workloads in parallel. The company is also filing with the FCC for a larger constellation.
Lonestar announces first commercial space data storage service
April 2026: Lonestar Data Holdings announced StarVault, which it’s calling “the world’s first commercially operational space-based sovereign data storage platform.” The service launches in October 2026 aboard Sidus Space’s LizzieSat-4 mission.
StarVault isn’t a full data center — it’s data storage with “advanced cryptographic key escrow capabilities,” according to the announcement. But it’s the first commercial space data service that enterprises can actually buy. Lonestar says demand from governments, financial institutions, and critical infrastructure operators has already exceeded expectations, and the company has ordered a second payload for launch next year. Lonestar has already flown four proof-of-concept data centers to space, including two to the Moon, according to the announcement. This is different because it’s the first one designed for paying customers.
Atomic-6 launches a marketplace for buying orbital capacity
April 2026: Atomic-6, a space systems company in Marietta, Georgia, has launched ODC.space — basically, a marketplace where you spec, price, and order orbital data center capacity the way you’d order a rack from a colo provider. You can buy either a sovereign satellite, where you get the whole thing, or colocated, where you rent space on someone else’s capacity, according to the announcement. Atomic-6 handles spacecraft build, launch, licensing, and operations through a partner network. You just supply the processors and the workload. Delivery runs two to three years, which Atomic-6 is carefully positioning against terrestrial data center timelines that now routinely run five-plus.
Base configurations start with 1U nodes on satellites rated up to 100 kW. Connectivity starts at 1 Gbps. A sovereign rack runs $3.5 million a month, Atomic-6 CEO Trevor Smith told space industry publication Payload.
Nvidia joins push for data centers in space
March 2026: At the GTC conference, Nvidia shared its plans to bring AI and accelerated computing to space, joining a slew of other tech giants with out-of-this-world computing ideas.
“We’re going to space,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced at GTC. But then he qualified those remarks. “We’ve already been out in space,” he said. The company’s chips are already in satellites in orbit above Earth. What’s new is that Nvidia is moving from isolated satellite deployments of its chips to larger-scale plans. “We’ll also build data centers in space,” he said. To prepare for that, Nvidia is working on a new version of its Vera Rubin flagship chip platform, Huang said. “It’s going to go out into space and start data centers out in space.”
According to Chen Su, Nvidia’s head of edge AI product marketing, the Space-1 Vera Rubin Module will be available in 2027. The company also announced a new chip that is available now, the Nvidia IGX Thor, which provides eight times the compute of the previous gold standard for space-based AI computing. IGX Thor is based on the Blackwell architecture.
Currently, satellite companies typically use the Nvidia Jetson Orin, an AI computer originally developed for robotics and other edge AI applications. “I would say it’s the most popular GPU that people use for space,” Su tells Network World. “It’s our embedded AI supercomputer.” Read the full story here: Nvidia joins push for data centers in space