Planet Labs

New Capabilities

Building GPU-native AI engine for satellite imagery with Nvidia

Earth observation satellites generate petabytes of imagery every day, but only about two percent of it ever reaches the ground. The bottleneck is physics: a satellite in low Earth orbit gets maybe ten minutes of ground-station contact per pass, and radio bandwidth cannot keep up with sensor resolution that doubles every few years. Nvidia's answer, announced at its annual developer conference on March 17, 2026, is to stop trying to move the data down and instead move the AI up. The Vera Rubin Space-1 Module packs 25 times the compute power of Nvidia's H100 chip into a radiation-hardened package designed to run large language models and foundation models directly in orbit.

Updated May 30