BEIJING, April 5 (Xinhua) -- China has launched a comprehensive feasibility study and pre-project assessment for a space-based intelligent computing constellation, a senior official from the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense has said.
Yu Guobin, deputy director of the administration's commercial space department, revealed at the 2026 Space Computing Industry Conference held in Beijing on Friday that the administration has taken the lead in organizing the project's kick-off meeting and expert panel sessions. The work is proceeding in an orderly manner, reported the Science and Technology Daily.
Space-based computing refers to the deployment of computational capacity in space, enabling seamless global coverage through satellite networking. Compared with terrestrial data centers, its greatest advantages lie in real-time responsiveness and global coverage.
Yu underscored the strategic necessity of developing space-based computing, noting that it is a key means to break through bottlenecks in ground computing and ensure the sustainable growth of the digital economy.
Traditional data centers are constrained by high energy consumption, limited land resources, high cooling costs, and limited coverage, which can hardly meet future demands for ultra-large-scale, green, and globally covered computing power, while space-based computing offers a zero-carbon, sustainable, and widely accessible alternative, said Yu.
In addition, in the traditional model, satellites collect massive amounts of data from space, but have very limited onboard computing power. All raw data must be transmitted back to ground stations for processing and analysis.
This model suffers from severe bandwidth limitations, with the utilization rate of real-time processed data below 10 percent. Space-based computing enables on-orbit intelligent processing, slashing data transmission latency to seconds, said Yu.
Xie Lina, deputy director of the data center department at the Cloud Computing and Big Data Research Institute under the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, explained that computing satellites can form laser communication links to achieve seamless global coverage and process data directly on orbit.
This reduces the data latency for scenarios such as disaster early warning and resource monitoring from hours to seconds, which is unattainable by ground-based computing, said Xie.
Space-based computing is also urgent for building a global ubiquitous computing network and serving national strategies, said Yu.
Applications such as emergency response, marine observation, and polar expeditions demand seamless global coverage, low-latency, and highly reliable services -- advantages that space-based computing can deliver, the official added.
According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China is accelerating the cultivation of the space computing industrial ecosystem.
The ministry will support forward-looking research on space computing, gradually establish a standards system covering hardware, software, networking and security, and promote the R&D of technologies and products such as space-borne radiation-resistant chips and inter-satellite laser communications. ■
