Elon Musk and his aerospace company have called for building a network 100 times the number of satellites currently in orbit. Friday, SpaceX filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch one million satellites intended to create an “orbital data center”. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about Musk’s plan to build an orbital data center, as company insiders mentioned following the news that the CEO was preparing to build an orbital data center. take SpaceX public.
According to the file spotted by PCMagthis data center would run on solar energy and provide computing capacity for artificial intelligence needs. SpaceX is asking to “deploy a system comprising up to one million satellites to operate in narrow orbital hulls extending up to 50 km each,” as detailed in the filing. According to SpaceX’s filing, “orbital data centers are the most efficient way to meet the growing demand for AI computing power” because they use “solar power with low operating and maintenance costs.”
To give an idea of the astronomical number of satellites SpaceX is requesting, the company recently reached the milestone of the 11,000th Starlink satellite launched. There aren’t as many in orbit because the satellites can have problems, but a unofficial site which tracks Starlink’s statistics claims there were more than 9,600 satellites in orbit as of January 30, 2026. The FCC is likely to reduce the amount requested by SpaceX in its filing, as the federal agency has done in the past. Earlier this month, the FCC approved SpaceX’s request to deploy an additional 7,500 Starlink satellites, following another 7,500 launched in 2022. However, this is far less than the amount of nearly 30,000 requested by SpaceX for the first time in 2020.
