NeevCloud, an Indian sovereign AI cloud infrastructure company under RackBank Datacenters Private Limited, an Indian data center service provider, has announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Agnikul Cosmos Private Limited, a Chennai-based space technology company, aiming to deliver India’s first indigenous, AI-powered data center in space.
The initiative aims to 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 percent of the world’s population lives more than 200 milliseconds away from the nearest AI data center, 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,” said NeevCloud explaining the need to improve AI infrastructure and connectivity. “The collaboration positions India at the intersection of two explosive markets—the US$ 255 billion global AI inference market, growing at a CAGR of 19.2 percent and the emerging orbital data center and space-compute economy.”
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 center, while the lower stage safely returns to Earth.
“We are not just building a data center in space, we are building an entirely new layer of orbital inferencing infrastructure,” said Narendra Sen, Founder & CEO of NeevCloud. “To truly democratize AI, we must decouple it from terrestrial limitations. “By partnering with Agnikul, we are taking our AI SuperCloud to the ultimate orbit edge – Space. This partnership ensures access to the AI infrastructure that powers the next decade of global intelligence, low-latency AI not just to our cities, but to every village and border post, AI for all.”
“As with all rockets, with more launches, we naturally leave behind upper stages in orbit,” said Srinath Ravichandran, Co-founder and CEO of Agnikul Cosmos. “Our convertible upper-stage technology lets these stages stay active and functional, turning them into usable assets that can host hardware and software in space including compute or data capabilities. That’s the next step for a space transportation company – you build, launch, recover, and then extend into orbit.”
NeevCloud will deploy datacenter, 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 center 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 & energy, manufacturing automation, and real-time AI decision-making. By operating from orbit, the model reduces the need for multiple replicated terrestrial edge data centers, 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+ orbital edge data centers 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.