A Long March-2D carrier rocket carrying a space computing satellite constellation blasts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China on May 14, 2025. (Photo by Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua)

　　In a futuristic office resembling a space station, Zhao Hongjie, executive vice president of Adaspace Technology Co., Ltd. (ADAspace), outlined a grand vision: to bring intelligent services to every corner of the Earth.

　　For this commercial aerospace enterprise, based in Chengdu, capital of southwest China"s Sichuan Province, 2026 will be a critical year to accelerate its "star compute" initiative.

　　The "star compute" plan is an ambitious project by the company to build AI space infrastructure composed of 2,800 computing satellites.

　　Under the plan, the "star compute" network will consist of 2,400 inference computing satellites and 400 training computing satellites, deployed in dawn-dusk orbits, sun-synchronous orbits and low-inclination orbits at altitudes between 500 and 1,000 kilometers. Through satellite-to-ground and inter-satellite laser communication networking, it will ultimately form a global training and inference computing network, capable of delivering inference power at the hundred-thousand-petaflop level and training power at the million-petaflop level.

　　The first group of satellites for this plan were successfully launched in May 2025. The second and third groups are already in production and are scheduled for orbital deployment in 2026, Zhao said.

　　The plan aims to build a thousand-satellite-scale network and start commercial operations by 2030, with over 95 percent being inference computing satellites, and to complete the full network of 2,800 satellites by 2035.