Pixxel to launch India’s first orbital data centre satellite

Pixxel, a planetary intelligence company, has announced a strategic partnership with Bengaluru startup Sarvam to develop and build India’s first orbital data centre satellite. Under the partnership, Pixxel will design, build, launch and operate the Pathfinder satellite. Sarvam will provide the AI backbone, handling both training and inference directly in orbit, with full-stack language models running on board the satellite, Pixxel said in a press release.

Unlike conventional satellite computing, which relies on low-power edge processors optimised for survival rather than performance, the Pathfinder satellite will host datacentre-class GPUs, the same generation of hardware as on-ground data centres that power frontier AI training and inference.

“Ground-based data centres are facing increasing constraints around energy, land, regulation, and scale, and the current model is becoming harder to sustain environmentally. Orbital data centres open up a new frontier, where compute can be powered by abundant solar energy, operate closer to space-based data, and move beyond some of the limits faced on Earth,” Awais Ahmed, CEO, Pixxel, said. “For Pixxel to build the next generation of space infrastructure, we have to help shape this shift, not watch it happen from the sidelines. With Sarvam, this mission is our first step toward making orbital data centres real, operational, and scalable from India.”

For Sarvam, the partnership extends the reach of its Full-stack Sovereign AI Platform beyond terrestrial infrastructure and into orbit. Sarvam’s models and inference platform, developed and governed in India, will run directly on the satellite’s GPU compute layer, processing data in orbit with no dependence on foreign cloud or ground infrastructure, the press release said.

“Sarvam has been building India’s full-stack AI platform from the ground up, and partnering with Pixxel allows us to extend that sovereign stack into space. Having India-built models running in orbit aboard an India-built satellite is exactly the kind of foundational capability that the country needs to control its own intelligence infrastructure,” Pratyush Kumar, CEO, Sarvam, said. “The goal has always been to make intelligence accessible to everyone, everywhere. Now, everywhere includes space. We are proud to power the AI backbone of this mission.”