Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen-3 became the world’s first general-purpose artificial intelligence model to be uploaded and operated in orbit, marking a milestone in China’s bid to lead the nascent space-based computing sector.
Chinese aerospace start-up Adaspace Technology successfully deployed Qwen-3 to a space computing centre in orbit where it executed multiple inference tasks in November, according to company executive vice-president Wang Yabo, who spoke at a conference on Monday, as reported by the Star Market Daily.
Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud computing services unit of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post.
Wang said Qwen-3 was deployed in Adaspace’s initial space computing centre that formed part of the firm’s “Star-Compute Project”, a 2,800-satellite network designed to power physical AI and support AI model training and inference.
The entire Qwen-3 process – from uploading queries from the ground to performing on-orbit inference and sending results back to Earth – was completed in less than two minutes, according to Wang.
Adaspace’s initial space computing centre, which was launched into space in May last year, represented the world’s first AI computing satellite constellation, comprising 12 satellites, according to a Securities Times report.
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