ISTANBUL

A Chinese aerospace company has deployed a general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) model aboard its orbiting satellites, state-run Xinhua News reported on Wednesday.

The GuoXing Aerospace Technology said on Monday that it has uplinked the Chinese tech firm Alibaba's Qwen3 large language model to its inaugural space-based computing center, allowing for end-to-end reasoning tasks to take place entirely in space.

"This marks the world's first deployment of a general-purpose large-scale AI model from ground control to an operational satellite constellation in orbit," the executive vice president of GuoXing Aerospace, Wang Yabo, said.

In May 2025, China launched a new constellation of 12 space computing satellites into space, which marked the first cluster of GuoXing Aerospace's space computing project.

During the trial, the Qwen3 AI model has managed to complete multiple experiments, with questions coming from Earth to satellite, processed on board, and results returned to Earth within two minutes.

Wang mentioned that GuoXing Aerospace's plans to construct a network of 2,800 specialized computing satellites by 2035.

The constellation’s second and third satellite clusters are scheduled to be launched this year, with a 1,000-satellite network completed by 2030, according to Wang.

Launched in April 2025, Alibaba's AI model Qwen3 has demonstrated performance comparable to or exceeding that of US-based OpenAI's o1 and Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s R1 models.