Elon Musk and his aerospace company have asked to build a network 100 times the number of satellites currently in orbit. Last Friday, SpaceX filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch a million satellites aimed at creating an “orbital data center.” This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of Musk’s plans to build an orbital data center, as it’s been discussed by company insiders following news that the CEO is reportedly preparing to take SpaceX public.

According to the filing seen by PCMagthis data center will run on solar power and provide computing capacity for need of artificial intelligence. SpaceX is seeking to “deploy a system of up to a million satellites to operate within narrow orbital shells of up to 50 km each,” as detailed in the filing. According to SpaceX’s filing, “orbital data centers are the most efficient way to meet the rapid demand for AI computing power” because they use “solar power with low operating and maintenance costs.”

To give some measure of the astronomical number of satellites requested by SpaceX, the company recently hit a milestone with the 11,000th Starlink satellite launched. There are not as many in orbit because satellites can have issues, but one unofficial website which tracks Starlink stats claims to have more than 9,600 satellites in orbit by January 30, 2026. The FCC is likely to inflate the amount requested by SpaceX in its filing, as the federal agency has done in the past. Earlier this month, it was approved by the FCC SpaceX’s request to deploy 7,500 more Starlink satellites, after another 7,500 are launched in 2022. However, this is still less than the nearly 30,000 amount that SpaceX initially requested in 2020.