Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen-3 has become one of the world’s first general-purpose artificial intelligence models to be deployed and run in orbit, according to a report by the South China Morning Post. The milestone marks a significant step in China’s push to develop space-based computing and reduce reliance on Earth-bound data centres.
The model was uploaded in November to an orbital space computing centre operated by Chinese aerospace start-up Adaspace Technology. There, Qwen-3 successfully carried out multiple inference tasks, confirming that large AI models can function reliably in the harsh environment of space. The achievement was disclosed by Adaspace executive vice-president Wang Yabo during a conference this week.
The deployment is part of Adaspace’s broader Star-Compute Project, an ambitious plan to build a constellation of roughly 2,800 satellites equipped with onboard computing capabilities. The network is intended to support physical AI applications as well as AI model training and inference directly in orbit, reducing latency and dependence on ground-based infrastructure.
Running AI models in space offers several strategic advantages. Processing data in orbit can allow satellites to analyze information locally rather than transmitting vast amounts of raw data back to Earth, saving bandwidth and enabling faster decision-making for applications such as Earth observation, disaster monitoring, and autonomous spacecraft operations.
Alibaba’s move also highlights intensifying global competition in off-Earth computing. Around the same time as Qwen-3’s deployment, US-based Starcloud demonstrated space-based AI by running Gemma, an open large language model derived from Google’s Gemini systems, in orbit. These parallel efforts suggest that space-hosted AI is rapidly moving from concept to reality.
Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing and AI arm of Alibaba Group, has positioned Qwen-3 as a general-purpose model capable of handling a wide range of tasks. Its successful operation in orbit underscores both the maturity of the model and China’s growing capabilities at the intersection of artificial intelligence and aerospace technology.
As satellite constellations become more complex and data-intensive, the ability to run advanced AI directly in space could reshape how information is processed beyond Earth, with implications for commercial, scientific, and strategic uses in the years ahead.
