The Sequence Opinion #888: Everything You Need to Know About the AI in Space Race

TheSequence · 2 weeks ago

Space is becoming a competitive frontier for AI companies because orbital locations offer unmetered energy and avoid terrestrial regulatory constraints, with trillion-dollar companies and startups racing to deploy compute infrastructure there. As of December 2025, nanoGPT was trained in orbit on an H100 processor aboard a 130-pound satellite, demonstrating that practical AI workloads now run in space. This shift reframes low Earth orbit from a scientific domain into contested economic territory where energy scarcity, rather than other computational bottlenecks, determines the next phase of AI capability development.