By Courtney Carlsen
Publication Date: 2026-04-13 13:15:00
The space economy is on the rise, and one company making waves is Planet Labs (PL +1.28%). With its fleet of satellites circling the planet and capturing snapshots daily, Planet Labs has emerged as a leader in Earth imagery.
The company recently took a step forward by integrating artificial intelligence (AI) directly into its satellites, enabling it to deliver valuable insights to customers in just minutes. For investors looking to tap into the future of space technology, here’s why Planet Labs stock deserves a look.
Image source: Getty Images.
Planet Labs’ AI upgrade can provide insights in minutes, not hours
Planet Labs implemented on-orbit artificial intelligence (AI) inference directly on its Pelican-4 satellite, powered by Nvidia‘s Jetson Orin module. Traditionally, Planet Labs would capture the image, download it, process it on Earth, and then send alerts to analysts, a process that could take hours. By implementing inference directly, its satellite can process data in space and provide insights in minutes.
The company demonstrated this in March, when it orbited 500 kilometers above Alice Springs, Australia, and captured an image of the airport there, aiming to detect airplanes on the ground at the moment the image was taken and report the information without human intermediaries. The detection achieved 80% accuracy on raw imagery, and the company will need to improve both precision and recall before putting it into practice. That said, CEO Will Marshall described…
