Kamal Ghorui
Elon Musk‘s SpaceX has filed a formal letter with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about Amazon’s petition to deny SpaceX’s 1 million-satellite proposal for orbiting data centers. In the letter, SpaceX argues that if regulators apply Amazon’s criticisms to its application, they must also apply the same standards to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos‘ Blue Origin, which themselves have filed an application for 51,600 AI satellites (original datacenter). In its filing, Blue Origin proposes to launch up to 51,600 datacenter satellites. The filing argues that FCC should approve Blue Origin’s plans because “insatiable demand for AI workloads” means orbiting servers represent “a complement to terrestrial infrastructure by introducing a new compute tier that operates independently of Earth-based constraints.” The filing says that the explosive growth in artificial intelligence (“AI”) workloads, machine learning, and cloud computing is driving unprecedented demand for data center capacity that is already encountering severe roadblocks to scale through terrestrial infrastructure alone.SpaceX seems to be effectively turning Amazon’s argument back on them, pushing for equal treatment across competing space projects.
Read SpaceX’s letter to FCC
Dear Ms. Dortch Blue Origin suggests its application is “similarly situated” to SpaceX’s pending orbital data center system application.’ In such situations, Amazon repeatedly requested that the Commission afford “similarly situated” applications similar treatment, arguing the failure to do so will “distort the playing field, introduce uncertainty and ambiguity that ossifies the licensing process with fighting and advocacy, and make coordination among operators more difficult.”Accordingly, SpaceX submits for the record Amazon’s petition to deny SpaceX’s orbital data center application and requests that the Commission apply the substantive and procedural arguments in Amazon’s petition to Blue Origin’s application to facilitate equitable and consistent review and treatment across both applications.To that same end, SpaceX incorporates by reference all public comments submitted on the record in its orbital data center application and requests the Commission assess the same substantive and procedural arguments with respect to Blue Origin’s application.Sincerely,/s/ Cecilia Tenge-RietbergCecilia Tenge-RietbergSenior Satellite Policy ManagerSpace Exploration Technologies Corp.
