NeevCloud, an Indian sovereign AI cloud infrastructure company, announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Agnikul Cosmos Private Limited, the Chennai-based space technology company, with an aim to deliver India’s first indigenous, AI-powered data centre in space.
It is expected to redefine how scalable and sovereign AI compute infrastructure is built and delivered. The partnership is expected to bridge the global AI access gap. The initiative will place high-performance AI inference nodes directly into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), enabling secure, low-latency intelligence for billions of users and critical industries worldwide.
Currently, over 80 per cent of the world’s population lives more than 200 milliseconds away from the nearest AI data centre, rendering real-time applications like autonomous driving, drone and border surveillance, remote robotic surgery, and industrial automation unreliable in vast regions of the global South.
Under the MoU, Agnikul Cosmos will provide the launch vehicle and orbital hosting platform, leveraging its lightweight and extendable upper-stage architecture. The upper stage, including the top nozzle, will remain in low Earth orbit and be repurposed as a fully functional space-based data centre, while the lower stage safely returns to Earth.
NeevCloud will deploy a data centre, operate, and orchestrate AI inferencing and processing capabilities within this orbital platform. The system will be powered entirely by solar energy and integrated with NeevCloud’s advanced AI cloud orchestration framework.
The AI data centre in space will function as a continuous, near real-time AI inferencing network, supporting latency-sensitive and mission-critical use cases such as defence, maritime and energy, manufacturing automation, and real-time AI decision-making.
By operating from orbit, the model reduces the need for multiple replicated terrestrial edge data centres, cutting GPU duplication, capital expenditure, land use, energy consumption, and cooling infrastructure, while significantly extending the effective utilisation and lifespan of high-value AI silicon.
The first pilot is scheduled for launch before the end of this year. Following successful validation, NeevCloud will scale the network to 600-plus orbital edge data centres over the next three years. This constellation will serve as a continuous, real-time inferencing capability that will offload heavy compute tasks from terrestrial devices to AI chips in space. One can imagine six hundred thinking machines in orbit, each creating direct, traffic-free pathways for billions of people.
The collaboration positions India at the intersection of two explosive markets—the $255 billion global AI inference market, growing at a CAGR of 19.2 per cent and the emerging orbital data centre and space-compute economy.
This move is rendered economically sustainable as it significantly slashes capital expenditure and deployment costs, effectively transforming space into a secure, cost-efficient extension of India’s domestic AI ecosystem.
This partnership also marks NeevCloud’s evolution from terrestrial data centres to space-enabled AI ecosystems, while enabling Agnikul Cosmos to expand beyond launch services into comprehensive orbital infrastructure platforms.
Before the end of this year, they will launch India's first space-based AI data centre—a computer that bypasses the entire terrestrial internet traffic jam. Once successful, they plan to launch six hundred more within three years. Imagine six hundred thinking machines in orbit, each creating direct, traffic-free pathways for billions of people.
“LEO (Low Earth Orbit) is where satellites already live. It is close enough to Earth that signals reach it in milliseconds, but far enough that one space-based computer can serve an entire continent. An AI computer in LEO does not have to wait in the terrestrial Internet’s traffic. It operates on a separate, clean, fast highway—space itself. Agnikul Cosmos’s Agnibaan rockets do not waste their upper stages. Instead of letting them fall back to Earth as junk, they transform into functioning data centres that live in orbit. They already proved this works with India's first private rocket launch from India's first private launch pad,” explained space analyst Girish Linganna.
This will revolutionise communication. “A farmer in a remote village will get instant weather predictions without waiting. A border soldier will get real-time threat analysis instantly. A remote patient gets immediate medical AI consultation. A village factory will be able to run automated production safely without delays. A self-driving car will work anywhere on Earth with perfect responsiveness. The two-hundred-millisecond latency gap closes because the High-Speed Bypass through space skips the entire terrestrial internet traffic,” added Linganna.
