On Friday, January 30, 2026, Elon Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX officially filed a request with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to deploy a constellation of up to one million satellites into space.
The one million satellites will rotate round the Earth in low orbit and harness abundant sunlight to fulfil its purposes of powering artificial intelligence computing and the applications that rely on them and global network traffic.
The filing describes the move as “orbital data centres”. Data centres are the physical backbone of AI, requiring massive amounts of power. SpaceX and Musk are pitching this as a solution to the skyrocketing computing power needed for AI models that current data centres on Earth struggle to support efficiently.
They say solar power is abundant in space, giving the data centres potentially 5× more effectiveness than on the surface.
The filed document appeared on Friday, just one day after reports surfaced that SpaceX and Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, are holding talks about a potential merger ahead of a high-profile public listing expected later this year.
If the deal moves forward, it could significantly accelerate SpaceX’s push to deploy data centres in orbit, strengthening Musk’s position as he competes with major players like Google, Meta, and OpenAI in an intensifying global race to dominate artificial intelligence.
"By directly harnessing near-constant solar power with little operating or maintenance costs, these satellites will achieve transformative cost and energy efficiency while significantly reducing the environmental impact associated with terrestrial data centres," the FCC filing said.
At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Musk reiterated his belief that space-based solar power and AI infrastructure could become viable within 2 to 3 years, provided launch costs drop dramatically.
He highlighted Starship, SpaceX’s large reusable rocket, as the critical enabler for dramatically cheaper and more frequent access to orbit, citing that delivering hardware to orbit “below air-freight cost” is essential to make the idea economical.
"Fortunately, the development of fully reusable launch vehicles like Starship that can deploy millions of tonnes of mass per year to orbit when launching at rate means on-orbit processing capacity can reach unprecedented scale and speed compared to terrestrial buildouts, with significantly reduced environmental impact," SpaceX said.
However, Elon Musk and his company would need the telecom regulator's approval to move forward. It's worth noting that initial small-scale orbital data centre tests could happen as early as 2027 and 2028, with full deployment potentially in the 2030s if early steps prove successful.
Although SpaceX is not expected to actually deploy one million satellites, especially given that only about 15,000 satellites are currently in orbit. Operators often apply for authorisation covering far more spacecraft than they plan to launch.
This approach gives them room to adjust designs and scale over time. SpaceX followed a similar strategy with Starlink, initially requesting permission for 42,000 satellites before beginning deployment. Today, the Starlink constellation includes approximately 9,500 satellites in orbit.
Satellites would orbit between roughly 500 km and 2,000 km, with clusters arranged in different orbital “shells” to balance sunlight exposure and workload distribution. They would link together using high-bandwidth optical (laser) links, forming a mesh network in space that could hand data down to ground stations via existing or enhanced Starlink infrastructure.
