China Has Begun Assembling Its Supercomputer in Space

China is starting to assemble its supercomputer in space, reports The Verge, writes UNN.

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China has launched the first 12 satellites of an orbital supercomputer satellite network of 2,800 satellites, Space News reports. According to an ADA Space announcement (machine translated), the satellites, created by ADA Space, Zhijiang Laboratory and Neijang High-Tech Zone, will be able to independently process the data they collect, rather than relying on ground stations.

The satellites are part of ADA Space's "Star Compute" program and the first of what it calls the "Three-Body Computing Constellation," the company writes. Each of the 12 satellites has a built-in artificial intelligence model with 8 billion parameters and is capable of performing 744 tera-operations per second (TOPS) - a measure of their artificial intelligence computing power - and together ADA Space says they can manage 5 peta-operations per second, or POPS. That's a little more than, say, the 40 TOPS needed for a Microsoft Copilot PC. The ultimate goal is to have a network of thousands of satellites reaching 1,000 POPS, according to the Chinese government.

According to Space News, the satellites communicate with each other at speeds of up to 100 Gbps using lasers and share 30 terabytes of memory. The 12 launched last week carry scientific payloads, including an X-ray polarization detector to capture short-lived cosmic phenomena such as gamma-ray bursts. The satellites also have the ability to create three-dimensional digital twin data that can be used for purposes such as emergency response, gaming and tourism, ADA Space said.

According to the South China Morning Post, the benefits of a space-based supercomputer go beyond saving communication time. The publication notes that traditional satellite transmissions are slow, and that "less than 10 percent" of satellite data makes it to Earth due to things like limited bandwidth and ground station availability. And Jonathan McDowell, a space historian and astronomer at Harvard University, told the publication: "Orbital data centers can use solar energy and radiate its heat into space, reducing energy needs and carbon footprint." He said that both the US and Europe could implement similar projects in the future, SCMP writes.

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