China's push into orbital data centres risks leaving Europe behind, according to a new policy brief from the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI).
Orbital data centres are increasingly seen as key strategic assets for processing the vast amounts of data generated by AI and satellite systems.
The brief, titled "Constellating Compute: China's Domestic Policy Towards Orbital Data Centre Leadership," warns that if the technological gap widens significantly, Europe risks having to compute its own space data through third-party actors and losing access to orbital information.
European efforts are under way but remain limited in scale.
The EU-funded research project ASCEND, backed under Horizon Europe since 2023, found that orbital data centres could strengthen European digital sovereignty.
