In a major technological breakthrough, India is set to deploy its first orbital data centre satellite, as Sarvam AI partners with Pixxel Space to power an advanced AI system in space.
According to Sarvam, the mission marks a first-of-its-kind achievement for the country, with India-built artificial intelligence (AI) models that will run on an India-built satellite. Notably, both training and inference processes will be conducted directly in orbit — eliminating reliance on foreign cloud services or ground-based infrastructure, creating a fully sovereign pipeline from observation to insight, end to end.
Traditionally, satellites capture data and transmit it back to Earth for processing. This upcoming mission aims to disrupt that model by enabling real-time data analysis in space itself.
The demonstrator satellite will be equipped with datacentre-grade GPUs — the same class of hardware used to power AI systems on Earth. These onboard models will process hyperspectral imagery in real time, significantly reducing latency and enabling faster insights for applications.
It said the mission would validate real-time AI inference and data processing in the harsh space environment, testing performance, power management, thermal constraints and real-time data workflows under operational conditions.
Sarvam is a Bengaluru-based company that develops Large Language Modules and multimodal AI system. Built with the vision of creating AI systems specifically for India, the organisation is developing artificial intelligence tailored to India’s need by building foundational components and applying them to the country’s unique linguistic enterprise and government’s requirements.
Meanwhile, Pixxel too took to X saying, “We are partnering with Sarvam AI to bring sovereign AI into the orbit abord India’s first orbital data centre satellite a pathfinder mission bringing datacentre-class GPUs and high-performance remote sensing together in space. The demonstrator marks a step towards making orbital data centres real, operational and scalable from India.”
