The companies said space-based AI infrastructure could support latency-sensitive applications such as autonomous systems, defence and surveillance, industrial automation and remote medical technologies. NeevCloud, an AI cloud infrastructure company under RackBank, has partnered with space-tech startup Agnikul Cosmos to develop what the companies claim will be India’s first indigenous AI data centre in space, with a pilot launch targeted before the end of 2026.
The orbital data centre will be powered by solar energy and integrated with NeevCloud’s AI cloud orchestration framework.
“To truly democratise AI, we must decouple it from terrestrial limitations. By partnering with Agnikul, we are taking our AI SuperCloud to the ultimate orbit edge — space,” said Narendra Sen, founder and chief executive of NeevCloud.
Under the agreement, Chennai-based Agnikul will provide launch vehicle capabilities and orbital hosting infrastructure using its extendable upper-stage rocket architecture. The companies plan to repurpose upper-stage rocket components that typically remain in orbit into functional space-based compute infrastructure.
“Our convertible upper-stage technology allows these stages to remain active and functional, turning them into usable assets that can host compute or data capabilities in space,” said Srinath Ravichandran, co-founder and chief executive of Agnikul Cosmos.
The companies said space-based AI infrastructure could support latency-sensitive applications such as autonomous systems, defence and surveillance, industrial automation and remote medical technologies.
They estimate that more than 80 per cent of the global population currently operates at distances that create latency challenges for real-time AI workloads.
Following the pilot launch, the partners plan to scale the network to more than 600 orbital edge data centres by 2030, creating a continuous real-time inferencing network that offloads heavy compute tasks from ground-based infrastructure.
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