Nvidia Heads to the Final Frontier: Stakes Claim to the $1.8 Trillion Space Economy

• 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.

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