The core thesis of this essay is simple to state: space is becoming a new frontier for AI ' and one of the most competitive ones. AI's frontiers have always been defined by scarcity. When the scarce thing was ideas, the frontier was architectures; when it was data, the frontier was the open web; when it was FLOPs, the frontier was the fab. Today the scarce thing is energy ' grid capacity, cooling water, land, permits ' and orbit is the one place in reach where energy is effectively unmetered and no zoning board has jurisdiction. That makes low Earth orbit not a science experiment but contested economic territory, and the industry is treating it exactly that way: trillion-dollar companies, hyperscalers, chipmakers, nation-states, and venture-backed startups are all filing, launching, and spending against each other on compressed timelines, with real hardware already running in orbit. As of December 2025, the first large language model ever trained in space was nanoGPT ' Karpathy's...
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