US and China Race to Deploy AI Computing Infrastructure in Low Earth Orbit

Over the past nine months, low Earth orbit has emerged as a new frontier in AI infrastructure, with American and Chinese actors competing to deploy raw computing power in space rather than just communications hardware. Key milestones include an Nvidia-backed startup running Google's Gemma model on a single H100 GPU aboard a satellite in November 2025, followed by the first GPU-class orbital data center launched in March 2026. SpaceX has filed for a constellation of up to one million AI satellites and signed approximately $26 billion in annualized compute agreements with Anthropic and Google. By July 2026, a satellite had successfully run the first multimodal AI system entirely in orbit, autonomously identifying targets without ground-station input. Analysts note that key decisions being made now — including spectrum filings, manufacturing commitments, and bilateral contracts — could determine control of this orbital computing layer for decades.