India, March 1 -- As AI adoption accelerates, the bottleneck is no longer model innovation alone - it is infrastructure. Building terrestrial data centres takes up to 24 months, requiring land acquisition, power substations, cooling systems, fibre connectivity and regulatory approvals.

This is the context in which cloud services firm NeevCloud and spacetech startup Agnikul are proposing an orbital AI data centre architecture, aka data centres in space. It's an idea that was also floated by Elon Musk's SpaceX, and it also drew plenty of criticism for being unfeasible and was even ridiculed by many.

But, according to both NeevCloud and Agnikul, the idea is not as far-fetched. The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in...