• Nvidia (NVDA) deployed its Jetson Orin AI chip on Planet Labs’ Pelican-4 satellite and partnered with Firefly Aerospace to embed Jetson on the Elytra spacecraft for lunar imaging, demonstrating on-orbit AI processing that reduces downlink costs and latency. AMD (AMD) offers competing accelerators, but Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem dominance in terrestrial AI development positions developers to stay locked into Nvidia when moving to space applications.

• Nvidia is expanding its edge AI platform into the $1.8 trillion projected space economy by 2035, with live demonstrations on satellites and lunar spacecraft validating its technology and opening a durable adjacency beyond its core data-center GPU business.

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AI chips are no longer just training models in giant data centers on Earth but are also going to the Moon, analyzing images from lunar orbit before beaming back only the insights that matter. That’s exactly what Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) is doing.

While earthbound hyperscalers still drive the bulk of Nvidia’s growth, two announcements this week —  one from Planet Labs (NYSE:PL) and one from Firefly Aerospace (NASDAQ:FLY) — show the chipmaker is extending its edge AI platform into space. That positions the stock for a large slice of the rapidly growing space economy, which McKinsey projects will expand from $630 billion in 2023 to $1.8 trillion by 2035.

Nvidia’s Jetson Platform Proves Itself in Orbit

Let’s start with the hardware that makes this possible. Nvidia’s Jetson Orin module delivers high-performance AI inference in a compact, power-efficient package built for size-, weight- and power-constrained environments. Planet Labs announced on April 7 that its Pelican-4 satellite successfully ran object-detection AI onboard using the Jetson Orin. The satellite captured an airport image over Australia and identified aircraft in moments. Raw data stayed in orbit; only compact results headed to the ground. This cuts downlink costs and latency for Earth-observation customers.

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This morning, Firefly Aerospace revealed a collaboration with Nvidia to embed the same Jetson platform into its Elytra spacecraft for the Ocula lunar imaging service. Firefly’s announcement states the setup will process high-resolution lunar imagery in orbit during the Blue Ghost Mission 2, scheduled for late 2026. Elytra stays in lunar orbit for five years, enabling repeated mapping and change detection. In both cases, Nvidia’s software stack — built on CUDA — runs the AI models developed by each partner. No custom silicon required.