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Qwen3, the generative AI model developed by China's Alibaba, has been uploaded to a computer network consisting of 12 satellites and made available for use in space.
A Chinese space technology company has used a general-purpose AI model in space by uploading it to a computer network established with satellites in Earth orbit.
According to Xinhua, Guoxing Aerospace Technology, known as "ADA Space," made Alibaba's generative AI model Qwen3 available for use in space by uploading it to a computer network consisting of 12 satellites.
Wang Yabo, Executive Vice President of the Chengdu-based company, announced the details of the experiment at a conference held in Guangzhou, China.
“FIRST EXAMPLE”
Wang stated that the AI model uploaded to the orbital computer network successfully performed numerous reasoning operations with questions and directives from ground control on Earth. He added, "This was the first instance of a general-purpose AI model being uploaded from ground control to an operational satellite network and used."
Wang noted that the entire process, from issuing commands from the ground to the AI making inferences in space and sending back results, was completed in 2 minutes.
ADA Space had launched 12 space computing satellites into low Earth orbit in May 2025. The company aims to establish a space computer network of 2,800 satellites in total by 2025, with 2,400 used for AI inference operations and 400 for AI training, under its project named "Star-Compute."
Washington-based space computing company Starcloud had used the NanoGPT AI model, developed by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, by uploading it to a satellite equipped with Nvidia's H100 graphics processors used in AI training, in November 2025. This was the first instance of AI being used in space.
