The Cloud Beyond The Clouds: Startups Firm Up Orbital AI Data Centre Plans

Cloud services firm NeevCloud and spacetech startup Agnikul are proposing an orbital AI data centre architecture, aka data centres in space.

Faced with mounting land and energy pressures, a handful of companies are exploring an orbital data centres, which has emerged as an unconventional alternative

Critics argue true data-centre-scale facility would require substantial mass, making it commercially unviable at current launch costs.

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As AI adoption accelerates, the bottleneck is no longer model innovation alone — it is infrastructure. Building terrestrial data centres takes up to 24 months, requiring land acquisition, power substations, cooling systems, fibre connectivity and regulatory approvals. 

This is the context in which cloud services firm NeevCloud and spacetech startup Agnikul are proposing an orbital AI data centre architecture, aka data centres in space. It’s an idea that was also floated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and it also drew plenty of criticism for being unfeasible and was even ridiculed by many.  

But, according to both NeevCloud and Agnikul, the idea is not as far-fetched. The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in February to deploy inference infrastructure in low-earth orbit (LEO), roughly 300 kilometres above the planet. 

Even in the larger scheme of things in spacetech, this is one of those moonshots that could actually have global ramifications. So, what’s the big deal and hype about? 

Why Orbital Data........

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