In a document filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Blue Origin described “Project Sunrise” as requesting permission to “ease mounting pressure on US communities and natural resources by shifting energy – and water-intensive compute away from terrestrial data centres.”
The satellites are planned to function at altitudes ranging from 500 to 1,800 kilometres, with each orbital plane containing between 300 and 1,000 satellites.
Despite the filing not revealing much information about the satellites and how much power it plans to generate, it reveals the company will use another satellite network it is proposing, called TeraWave.
The move follows the company’s struggle to meet the power demands of AI training and inference.
It added that orbiting computing infrastructure offers key advantages over land-based data centres, which face limits like scarce land and more cooling requirements.
The applications stated: “Space-based data centres will be a complement to terrestrial infrastructure by introducing a new compute tier that operates independently of Earth-based constraints.
“The built-in efficiencies of solar-powered satellites, always-on solar energy, lack of land or displacement costs, and nonexistent grid infrastructure disparities, fundamentally lower the marginal cost of compute capacity compared to terrestrial alternatives.”
However, the company is not the first to launch operations in space, with companies like SpaceX , Google and Amazon already deploying satellites in space for global internet coverage.
This follows comments made by the Amazon founder predicting gigawatt-scale data centres within two decades to solve soaring energy demands.
“Solar farms on Earth suffer from nighttime darkness, clouds, and rain,” Bezos explained during his conversation with John Elkann, chairman of Ferrari, last year, “But solar panels placed in orbit can generate continuous power 24/7.”
This uninterrupted access to sunlight means space-based solar arrays could provide a steady and reliable power supply for energy-intensive data centres, without the weather-related downtime that plagues Earth-bound solar installations.
“These giant training clusters, those will be better built in space, because we have solar power there, 24/7. There are no clouds and no rain, no weather,” he commented.
“We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centres in space in the next couple of decades,” Bezos revealed.
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