Bezos wants 51,600 data satellites
March 23, 2026
By Chris Forrester
Just days after criticising rival Elon Musk for the SpaceX plans to launch 1 million satellites suitable for operating orbital data-centres, Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin rocket launch business has applied to place 51,600 satellites into orbit.
Bezos and Blue Origin call the scheme ‘Project Sunrise’ and as one critic pointed out: “’Project Sunrise’ needs a network that doesn’t exist, a rocket that’s hardly flown, and FCC approval”.
Nevertheless, Blue Origin made its formal application in a filing with the FCC on March 19th and specifically stated that the FCC should approve the application because there’s an “insatiable demand for AI workloads” and that an orbiting fleet of satellites represent “a complement to terrestrial infrastructure by introducing a new compute tier that operates independently of Earth-based constraints”.
Project Sunrise argues that Earth-based data centres will not be able to cope with the increased demand. “Space-based datacenters can help break this bottleneck,” the company claimed. “The built-in efficiencies of solar-powered satellites, always-on solar energy, lack of land or displacement costs, and non-existent grid infrastructure disparities, fundamentally lower the marginal cost of compute capacity compared to terrestrial alternatives.”
The request is to launch up to 51,600 satellites orbiting between 500-1800 kms, and using optical links to transmit and to also communicate with its TeraWave broadband system. TeraWave is a planned broadband fleet comprising more than 5,400 satellites (5,280 in LEO and 128 in MEO) with deployment starting in late 2027.
Project Sunrise says it could launch its first batch of TeraWave craft before the end of 2027.
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